O Pioneers!
A woman inherits a Nebraska farm and decides to stay when her brothers want to leave. Cather wrote the novel in a plain, deliberate prose that was unusual for 1913, and it is one of the first American novels to take the immigrant experience of the plains seriously.
The land is the main character: weather, soil, the effort of making a farm pay. Cather's later novels are more celebrated, but this one has a clarity that comes from direct knowledge. The ending, in which the heroine's success is measured against what it cost other people, is quietly complicated.
Public-domain status
First published in 1913. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Willa Cather died in 1947, so this work has been free to republish there since 2018.
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