O Pioneers!, Willa Cather - David Stouck (essay date 1991)
David Stouck (essay date 1991)
SOURCE: Stouck, David. “Historical Essay.” In O Pioneers!, by Willa Cather, edited by Susan J. Rosowski, Charles W. Mignon, and Kathleen Danker, pp. 283-303. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991.
[In the following essay, Stouck traces the publication of Cather's novel and discusses the sources of and influences on the work.]
Willa Cather liked to think of O Pioneers! as her first novel. When she sent a copy of the book to her friend Carrie Miner Sherwood in Red Cloud, Nebraska, she wrote on the flyleaf, “This was the first time I walked off on my own feet—everything before was half real and half an imitation of writers whom I admired. In this one I hit the home pasture and found that I was Yance Sorgensen and not Henry James.”1 O Pioneers!, published in 1913, was in fact Cather's second novel, preceded by Alexander's Bridge in 1912. Her feeling, however, that...
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