This collection of Cather writings include two of her novels---O Pioneers! and Antonia---and three short stories.

O Pioneers!
“One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away.” Thus begins O Pioneers!, the first of what has become known as Willa Cather’s Great Plains Trilogy. Cather was only nine years old when her family moved to Nebraska from their ancestral home in Virginia. She writes from personal knowledge of the Nebraska landscape and the European immigrants who first broke its soil. “Many of them had never worked on a farm until they took up their homesteads,” she writes in O Pioneers!.

Swedes, Norwegians, Germans, and Bohemians—later joined by the French—become neighbors and partners in the effort to carve a prosperous farm community from the harsh Nebraska plains, and Cather gives them life in her story of struggle, death, illicit love, and even a love that takes a lifetime to grow. Alexandra, the central character in this pioneer drama, represents the characteristics that Cather spent her life championing—an independent-minded woman who did the things that men did, matching the achievements of the most successful farmers and businessmen in Nebraska.

As Alexandra’s father lies dying at the age of forty-six, he looks back on the eleven years he has spent trying to domesticate his prairie acres into a farm: “It was still a wild thing that had its ugly moods; and no one knew when they were likely to come, or why” (p. 19). And nearly twenty years later, Alexandra gives it its due, in a sort of geomorphism, as she looks out over her well-mannered fields of wheat and corn: “The land did it. It had its little joke. It pretended to be poor because nobody knew how to work it right, and then, all at once, it worked itself. It woke up out of its sleep and stretched itself, and it was so big, so rich, just from sitting still” (p. 61). While Cather supplies a chorus of interesting, well-developed immigrant characters as a backdrop to Alexandra’s life drama, it is the land itself—the land that became Nebraska—that becomes a character in its own right, sharing top billing with the woman who nurtured it to productivity.

Cather’s literary gift is evident in her rich descriptions of places and people that give life to her well-crafted dramas. A keen observer of human nature, she brings alive an accurate painting of the culture of her times, and of equal importance, a visually stunning portrait of the rapidly changing American landscape.

My Ántonia
My Ántonia is a story within a story. Cather opens her first-person narrative with a chance meeting on a train between the unnamed speaker (presumably Cather herself) and Jim Burden, a childhood friend. As they reminisce about their years growing up in a Nebraska community that took shape around the lives of hopeful families flocking to become landowners in an untamed wilderness, they remember Ántonia, a beautiful, vibrant Bohemian girl, whose family suffered great hardship in attempting an agrarian lifestyle so foreign to their native European experience. “This girl seemed to mean to us the country, the conditions, the whole adventure of our childhood,” Cather writes.

The author presses Jim for his memories of Ántonia’s life, and he responds with a promise to write it all down and send it to her. The remainder of the novel is Jim’s written first-person account of his life, beginning with seeing Ántonia for the first time on the day he arrives in Nebraska as a ten-year-old orphan from Virginia coming to live with his grandparents. Living on neighboring farms, Ántonia and Jim become close, their friendship interrupted when Jim’s grandparents sell their prosperous farm and move into town into the neighborhood where the privileged live in large two-story or three-story homes. Their warm relationship resumes when Ántonia, like many farmers’ daughters, moves into one of those homes as a servant.

Jim and Ántonia represent two classes of pioneer Nebraska society: those whose ancestors arrived on the American continent a few generations earlier and those who are direct implants from nineteenth-century Europe. Speaking through her character Jim, Cather wags her literary finger at the “Americans” who looked down on the newly arrived immigrants, pointing out that the prosperous community leaders thirty and forty years later are the children and grandchildren of those newly arrived Europeans. The story seems surprisingly current: first arrivals are eager to shut the door behind themselves, loathe to recognize the legitimacy of those who come after.

Cather is an elegant writer, and as in her earlier novels, her rich descriptions of the landscape make the land itself a character in her narrative. As Jim dictates his autobiography, Ántonia, like the land, is a backdrop to his narrative—a subtle but powerful force that helps shape the life he leads and the person he becomes. Ántonia is, indeed, “the country, the conditions, the whole adventure” of his childhood—and Cather’s too.

The novel’s closing paragraphs are typical of Cather’s exquisite, insightful prose as Jim writes of watching Ántonia’s children emerge from the family’s underground food storage:
"We were standing outside talking, when they all came running up the steps together, big and little, tow heads and gold heads and brown, and flashing little naked legs; a veritable explosion of life out of the dark cave into the sunlight. It made me dizzy for a moment."

The variation in size and hair color seems to represent the diversity that has come together to create the “explosion of life” that is the young Nebraska.

three short stories and an author interview

Each of these stories is a character study. In “The Sculptor’s Funeral,” the character of a community is examined, all of its inhabitants found to be wanting any genuineness, except for the lawyer, whose effort to fit in is accomplished by living in an alcoholic fog. In “The Garden Lodge,” a woman’s childhood was interrupted by the need to become responsible and practical at a young age. After a short romantic foray into that missed youth, she returns to her comfortable, practical existence. “Paul’s Case” is subtitled “A Study in Temperament” and examines the frustrations of a young man who spent his life believing he was superior to his surroundings and meant for better things.

Death is a subtheme in each of the stories. With the story revolving around the funeral of a famous man brought to be buried near his childhood home, the role of death is a passive one in “The Sculptor’s Funeral”; the death of childhood dreams is a feature in “The Garden Lodge”; and in “Paul’s Case," the realization of childhood dreams becomes a cause for death.

Cather’s gift for rich descriptions of people and places is present in her stories, but takes back seat to her examination of their thoughts and inner lives.

Archie Latrobe Carroll's interview, published in The Bookman, was conducted in 1920 when Cather was an established and famous author but just three years shy of receiving the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It's an interesting peek into the lifestyle and motivation of a successful, prolific writer who established a disciplined approach to her craft very early in her career. ( )