Willa Cather’s 1913 novel “O Pioneers!” blows through you like the rippling winds of the Nebraska prairie itself—sharp, sweet, sad, and filled with the taste of the wilderness. That wilderness includes both the literal landscape of the prairie where the novel takes place and the interior landscape of the human spirit, filled with so much mystery yet vividly evoked by Cather’s masterful writing.
The novel is about the longing, loneliness, and restlessness present in the human soul, the ways that longing manifests (sometimes destructively), and how we attempt to anchor ourselves to something as immovable as the land itself.
