O Pioneers! Study Guide

Willa Cather was born into a large farming family in rural Virginia. In 1883, when Cather was ten years old, her family relocated to Red Cloud, Nebraska. She attended the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she paid her way by working for the Nebraska State Journal, and later moved to Pittsburgh to teach high school English. In 1906 she moved to New York City to work for McClure's Magazine, but began to write full-time in 1912. In her lifetime, Cather published 12 novels and many short stories, many of them focused on the plains and prairie of the American Midwest. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1922 for her novel One of Ours. A fiercely private person, Cather never married. Her most significant relationships were with women, most notably the editor Edith Lewis, with whom she lived in New York City from 1912 until her death in 1947.

In the late 19th century, many Northern Europeans traveled to settle in Nebraska and the Dakotas. Accustomed to small fishing villages in their countries of origin, many immigrant farmers despaired at the vast expanses, language barriers, and harsh weather that separated them from their neighbors in the prairie. This sense of isolation is one of the main themes connecting Cather’s prairie trilogy novels. O Pioneers! also appealed to progressives who were interested in social and economic issues because the novel explored women's strength and adaptability, and also brought attention to the hardships of immigrant life in the United States.

Many copies of O Pioneers! are accompanied by the poem, “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” by Walt Whitman, which is said to be the source of the novel's title. O Pioneers! is the first novel of Cather’s “prairie trilogy,” followed by The Song of the Lark (1915) and My Antonia (1918). Cather was also a great admirer of Sarah Orne Jewett, the author responsible for The Country of the Pointed Firs, a short story collection that describes the isolation and hardships of the inhabitants of decaying fishing villages along the coast of Maine.