O Pioneers! (Norton Critical Editions)

Willa Cather's masterful 1913 novel marks her return to the Nebraska of her youth, and to the stories of the immigrant settlers she had known during her childhood and teenage years in Red Cloud.

This Norton Critical Edition brings to lifethrough Cather's words, and through the words and images of othersthe uniquely American frontier experience. In inscribing a copy of O Pioneers! for a childhood friend, Cather wrote, In this one I hit the home pasture Contexts and Backgrounds includes a rich selection of autobiographical and biographical remembrances (including three interviews with Cather), literary contexts (by Cather and her contemporaries, Henry James and Sarah Orne Jewett), and writings on the American West (including selected letters that paint a picture of one family's life on the Nebraska prairie). Criticism provides seven contemporary reviews and eight modern critical interpretations by David Stouck, John J. Murphy, C. Susan Wiesenthal, Marilee Lindemann, Melissa Ryan, Guy Reynolds, and Sharon O'Brien.