Audiobook · read by volunteers
O Pioneers!
Willa Cather (1873–1947)
Read by rachelellen · 30 chapters · 5 h 48
About the book
At the end of the nineteenth century, on the high plains of Nebraska, a family of Swedish immigrants struggles to make a farm out of wild prairie. When the father dies, it is his daughter Alexandra Bergson who takes charge, with a quiet strength and a vision that her brothers do not share. Over the years she works the land, holds the family together and watches her friends and neighbours make their own choices, some happy, some tragic. Willa Cather's novel is a hymn to the land and to the people who tamed it, written in clear, luminous prose. It is a story of endurance, love and loss, and one of the finest portraits of pioneer life in American literature.
Introduction
Willa Cather (1873-1947) was an American novelist who grew up in Nebraska, and the landscape and immigrant communities of the prairie shaped much of her writing. O Pioneers!, published in 1913, was her first novel to draw fully on that world, and it is often considered the book in which she found her own voice.
The story is set in the farm country near Hanover, Nebraska, a fictional town that stands for the settlements of the region. The central figure is Alexandra Bergson, a woman of strong character who takes charge of the family farm and sees it prosper through patient work. Cather surrounds her with a vivid cast of Swedish, Bohemian and French settlers, and she gives their lives a quiet dignity that was unusual in the fiction of the time.
The title is borrowed from a poem by Walt Whitman, and the novel shares his belief in the grandeur of ordinary American work. Yet Cather's tone is her own: restrained, lyrical, attentive to light and weather and the slow progress of the seasons. Alongside the main story runs another of passion and its consequences, which gives the book its emotional depth.
The recording has thirty chapters and lasts almost six hours. It was read by a LibriVox volunteer, and it is an excellent introduction to one of the great American novelists. The novel's gentle pace and its sense of place make it a fine companion for listening, whether at home or on a journey, and its warmth stays with you long after the final chapter.
Public domain
Willa Cather died in 1947: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text