The next fortnightly book is Willa Cather's O Pioneers! While technically her second novel, Cather always saw O Pioneers!, published in 1913, as the first novel in which she really wrote a novel as such, rather than, as she generally thought of Alexander's Bridge, a sort of exercise in writing. Cather usually erased the traces of her writing process, but we know from various forms of evidence that O Pioneers! originally began its life as two distinct short stories that Cather one day realized would integrate well together, and with this insight suddenly the book just began falling into place; because of this, she at one point described it to a friend as a book that was not plotted but designed itself. The book is dedicated to Sarah Orne Jewett, an author from Maine whose writings about landscape and small communities in Maine made Cather recognize that something analogous could be done for Nebraska.
The title comes from a poem by Whitman, of course, and Cather places her own Whitmanesque poem at the beginning of the text:
Prairie Spring
by Willa CatherEvening and the flat land,
Rich and sombre and always silent;
The miles of fresh-plowed soil,
Heavy and black, full of strength and harshness;
The growing wheat, the growing weeds,
The toiling horses, the tired men;
The long empty roads,
Sullen fires of sunset, fading,
The eternal, unresponsive sky.
Against all this, Youth,
Flaming like the wild roses,
Singing like the larks over the plowed fields,
Flashing like a star out of the twilight;
Youth with its insupportable sweetness,
Its fierce necessity,
Its sharp desire,
Singing and singing,
Out of the lips of silence,
Out of the earthy dusk.
I happen to have the Barnes & Noble Classics edition of the work, but I notice that the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition is available online as well.
