O Pioneers!
"Alexandra, daughter of a Swedish immigrant farmer in Nebraska, inherits the family farm and finds love with an old friend." "The heroic battle for survival of simple pioneer folk in the Nebraska country of the 1880s. John Bergson, a Swedish farmer, struggles desperately with the soil but dies unsatisfied. His daughter Alexandra resolves to vindicate his faith, and her strong character carries her weak older brothers and her mother alng to a new zest for life. Years of privation are rewarded on the farm. But when Alexandra falls in love with Carl Linstrum, and her family objects because he is poor, he leaves to seek a different career. After Alexandra's younger brother Emil is killed by the jealous husband of the French girl Marie Shabata, however, Carl gives up his plans to go to he Klondike, returns to marry Alexandra and take up the life of the farm." Haydn. Thesaurus of Book Dig.
Stats for nerds
3recommend
4mentions
4people
2021–2024years
75% recommend25% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Someone else mentioned Thomas Hardy's "The Mayor of Casterbirdge". It's the one of his 5 major novels I haven't read. "Far From the Madding Crowd" and "Return of the Native" are okay, but the two that really are magnificent are:
"Jude the Obscure" - https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/153
"Tess of the D'Urbervilles" - https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/110
You can sense his fury at the society he was depicting. You might not want to read either of these, particularly "Tess", if you're prone to depression.
Frederick Jackson Turner, "The Frontier in American History" (1921) - https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/22994
This collection leads off with Turner's essay "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" (1893). It's considered by some the most influential historical essay about America ever written. Historians went back and forth on his claims for decades, and people pointed out many issues with them. It seems like the critics predominate now. But it's still worth reading, particularly since (right or wrong) his ideas influenced the way we think of ourselves. Turner was a very good writer - he was a noted orator, and his essays have an oratorical quality - and the other essays in the collection are pretty good, too.
Owen Wister, "The Virginian" - https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1298
Zane Grey, "Riders of the Purple Sage" - https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1300
And the sequel: "The Rainbow Trail" - https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5067
"The Virginian" (1902) and "Riders" (1912) established many of the themes and tropes for the "standard" western, and they're still fun to read. But the genre comprises many other kinds of writing - e.g. A. B. Guthrie, Elmer Kelton, and the next writer.
Willa Cather's novels:
The "plains trilogy" (the stories are set in Nebraska and Colorado, but otherwise unrelated):
"O Pioneers!" (1913) - https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24
"The Song of the Lark" (1915) - https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/44
"My Ántonia" (1918) - https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19810
And not quite a hundred years ago, but a wonderful novel:
"Death Comes for the Archbishop" (1927) - https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/69730
A few brief mentions: James Joyce's "Ulysses", though I had a tough time getting through it; some of Nathaniel Hawthorne's short stories (e.g. "The Minister's Black Veil"); "Njal's Saga" (I liked the Penguin edition with the translation by Magnusson and Pallson); the great works of classic fantasy (Lord Dunsany, E. R. Eddison, William Morris, Arthur Machen); the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.
- The first Willa Cather I read was O Pioneers. Long after college. I thought I was reasonably well read. I knew the name, Willa Cather, of course, but assumed that since I hadn't read any Cather (hadn't been induced to read any Cather as part of my many years of formal education) that her work must not have quite stood the test of time, somehow. I bought the book in the Gateway Arch gift shop in St Louis and read it on the airplane home. I think I must have expected a certain amount of schmaltz. Simple stories from the prairie simply told, perhaps.
You could have knocked me over with a feather. So, so, so, so good; unrelentingly, from the opening paragraph to the last page. Easy to see, in just that one slim book, why her contemporaries ranked her with James, Yeats, Faulkner, Joyce, and Hemingway.
Katherine Ann Porter wrote a short, lovely, trenchant essay, Reflections on Willa Cather, which is largely about looking (or not) for connections between an author's life and her work. Or perhaps it's mostly about Katherine Ann Porter.
> This is masterly and water-clear and autobiography enough for me: my mind goes with tenderness to the lonely slow-moving girl who happened to be an artist coming back from reading Latin and Greek with the old storekeeper, helping with the housework, then sitting by the fireplace to talk down an assertive brood of brothers and sisters, practicing her art on them, refusing to be lost among them — the longest-winged one who would fly free at last.
- In the great short books category, Willa Cather’s plains trilogy books are like 150-200 pages each, they’re fast reads and the prose is excellent — I’d start with ‘O Pioneers!’
- I think this is an important point. Recently I was reading a post that talked about how one belongs to a community. Which on one hand means you are accepted and identify with it, but also that the community has a claim back upon you. People within that community depend on each other and that dependencies offers opportunity to connect more deeply.
In the article he blocks out a longer excerpt from O Pioneers! by Willa Cather, with this bolded bit:
> Freedom so often means that one isn't needed anywhere.
https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/the-convivial-soc...
