O Pioneers!, Willa Cather - The Nation (review date 4 September 1913)
The Nation (review date 4 September 1913)
SOURCE: A review of O Pioneers! The Nation 97 (4 September 1913): 210-11.
[In the following review, the anonymous critic provides a favorable assessment of O Pioneers!]
Few American novels of recent years have impressed us so strongly as this [O Pioneers!]. There are two perils by which our fiction on the larger scale is beset—on the one hand a self-conscious cultivation of the “literary” quality, and on the other an equally self-conscious avoidance of it. The point may be illustrated by the work of two “late” novelists of native force, Frank Norris and David Graham Phillips. There was no doubt about the Americanism of either of them, so far as their subject-matter was concerned. It was the newer Americanism which has displaced the New Englandism of our nineteenth-century fiction. These men saw American life on a larger scale. Its scope and variety, its promise rather than...
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