[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.”¹O Pioneers!, published in 1913, was in fact Cather's second novel, preceded by Alexander's Bridge in 1912. Her feeling, however, that her career as a novelist really began with O Pioneers! was an abiding one and was restated in an essay she wrote in 1931 for The Colophon titled “My First Novels [There Were Two].” There she describes Alexander's Bridge with its transatlantic setting and sophisticated drawing-room characters as a studio picture, done according to the best standards of the day, but conventional and shallow. She wrote it, she says, in the manner of Henry James and Edith Wharton but without their qualifications. O Pioneers!, on the other hand, she wrote for herself, and her subjects were her old neighbors and the Nebraska farm country where she had grown up. The book contained not only her true subject matter but was written in her own style. “Here,” she said, “there was no arranging or ‘inventing’; everything was spontaneous and took its own place.” Writing the book “was like taking a ride through a familiar country on a horse that knew the way” (92-93). When Houghton Mifflin brought out the Autograph Edition of her works in 1937, she placed O Pioneers! at the beginning of the series.

COMPOSITION

Although Willa Cather was always secretive about the writing of her books, we have from her letters, her essay “My First Novels,” and the memoirs of her friends a considerable amount of information about the composition of O Pioneers! The work had its genesis in two Nebraska stories that she had written separately. In the autumn of 1911, on leave from her post as managing editor at McClure's Magazine, she spent three productive months with her friend Isabelle McClung at Cherry Valley in upstate New York; there she revised the initial magazine installment of Alexander's Bridge; wrote one of her best short stories, “The Bohemian Girl”; and completed a story about a Swedish farm woman titled “Alexandra,” which according to Edith Lewis she had begun some time previously (Lewis 79). The following spring Cather made a lengthy trip to the Southwest. Before she left, she took out the Alexandra story and read it to Lewis, but was dissatisfied and made no attempt to publish it. By Lewis's account “Alexandra” began where O Pioneers! starts; continued almost unchanged through Part I of the novel, “The Wild Land”; and concluded with Alexandra's dream, which now appears at the end of Part III.

On her return from the Southwest, Cather spent five weeks in June and July in Red Cloud, where she visited with old neighbors and watched the wheat harvest for the first time in several years. She wrote to Elizabeth Sergeant saying that on the edge of a wheat field she had the idea for another story—she was going to call it “The White Mulberry Tree” (5 July 1913). She enclosed in the letter a copy of a poem she had written titled “Prairie Spring,” which McClure's published the following December and which Cather eventually placed at the beginning of O Pioneers! The mood and theme of the novel are anticipated by the poem's depiction of the flat and somber land, the epic labors of the pioneers, and the romantic exaltation of youth. In Pittsburgh, in her sewing-room study at the McClung residence, she set about in August writing the new story, which James Woodress has described as a Nebraska version of Dante's story of Paolo and Francesca (Willa Cather 231). In Cather's story, a Bohemian farmer surprises and kills his wife and her lover, who are lying together in his orchard under a white mulberry tree.

At some point, however, in the writing of this second story, Cather suddenly had the idea that “Alexandra” and “The White Mulberry Tree” belonged together. Later, to Elizabeth Sergeant, she described this coming together of the two parts of the book “as a sudden inner explosion and enlightenment,” something she had experienced before only in the writing of a poem. This was an important creative experience because the inner explosion seemed to dictate the form the novel would take, a work with “inevitable shape that is not plotted but designs itself” (Sergeant 116). Cather would henceforth believe in organic form, letting the materials of the work dictate the structure, form rising from function. Nonetheless, it took five months for her to work out the details of the design, and the manuscript for O Pioneers! was not completed until December 1912. “Alexandra” was still the backbone of the story, lengthened by some fifty percent, into which was spliced the story of the lovers, “The White Mulberry Tree.” Referring to its rural subject matter, Cather described her new book as “a two-part pastoral” (Sergeant 86).

Cather sent the manuscript to Houghton Mifflin, but she also sent a copy to Elizabeth Sergeant early in 1913, asking for an opinion. She expressed her own reservations, feeling that there was some hasty writing and wondering if it was too much about crops and farming. She told Sergeant that as she wrote, the country insisted on being the hero and she did not interfere because the story had come out of the long grasses, like Dvořák's New World Symphony, which Dvořák had composed after spending several weeks in Nebraska in the 1880s. What she feared, however, was that there might be emotional writing, something she dreaded, and she asked Sergeant to come down hard on any such passages. She also asked Sergeant's advice about publishing O Pioneers! in the same volume with “The Bohemian Girl” (Sergeant 91-92). Sergeant's side of the correspondence has not survived, so we do not know what advice she may have offered. Her enthusiasm for the manuscript, however, was such that it is not likely that she suggested any significant changes. Ferris Greenslet, Cather's friend at Houghton Mifflin, was equally enthusiastic. He reported to his associates that the novel “ought to … definitely establish the author as a novelist of the first rank” (Brown 179), and accordingly, in March 1913, the company offered her a contract for publication.

MATERIALS

Willa Cather's fiction is autobiographical to an uncommon degree, her characters suggested by actual people she had known. My Ántonia, for example, follows closely the life of her old Nebraska friend Anna Pavelka, while A Lost Lady is based on the author's impressions of Lyra Garber, the wife of a former governor of Nebraska. But for O Pioneers! no specific prototypes have ever been identified. Elizabeth Sergeant, with whom Cather communicated most about the composing of the novel, has written, “How ‘close to life’ the characters in O Pioneers! were I was never to know with exactitude from herself, in spite of our many conversations and talks about the book” (Sergeant 90). Cather said the book was about old neighbors, and it seems likely that she had the Lambrechts, German-speaking neighbors in Catherton precinct, in mind when she composed this novel. Elsewhere, however, she insisted that in all her fiction her characters were composites, and probably this is particularly true of O Pioneers! She also said to both Elizabeth Sergeant and Zoë Akins that the land was the hero, and perhaps that is why residents in Webster County, Nebraska, point to certain features of the terrain—a slough, a duck pond, the river, a rise in the land—as the identifiable originals for the novel.

In an interview she gave for the Philadelphia Record in August 1913, Cather described some of the experiences that she had transmuted into fiction. She told about the Cather family's move west in 1883 from Virginia's Shenandoah Valley when she was nine years old. Although her grandparents had arrived eight years before, the country “was still wild and bleak enough” when they reached Nebraska, “the roads … mostly faint trails over the bunch grass.” In a particularly vivid phrase, she said it was “a country as bare as a piece of sheet iron.” She was homesick, but her father told her that one had to show grit in a new country. She saw her feelings of displacement and the need for courage reflected especially in the lives of the immigrants:

We had very few American neighbors—they were mostly Swedes and Danes, Norwegians and Bohemians. I liked them from the first and they made up for what I missed in the country. I particularly liked the old women, they understood my homesickness and were kind to me. I had met “traveled” people in Virginia and Washington, but these old women on the farms were the first people who ever gave me the real feeling of an older world across the sea. Even when they spoke very little English, the old women somehow managed to tell me a great many stories about the old country. They talk more freely to a child than to grown people, and I always felt as if every word they said to me counted for twenty.

(Bohlke 10)

In an interview for the Bookman eight years later, Cather credited the immigrant women and their stories as a direct source of inspiration for O Pioneers! and My Ántonia:

I grew fond of some of these immigrants—particularly the old women, who used to tell me of their home country. I used to think them underrated, and wanted to explain them to their neighbors. Their stories used to go round and round in my head at night. This was, with me, the initial impulse. I didn't know any writing people. I had an enthusiasm for a kind of country and a kind of people.

(Bohlke 20)

She found her subject in the memories of her youth—the pioneers' struggle to tame a wild land, the storms of winter, the heat and drought of summer, the tending of livestock, the exhilarating labors of harvest time. These she focused in the story of Alexandra Bergson, the leader of the Scandinavian farming community, who embodies the creative instincts, the will, and the foresight necessary to bring the unbroken country into prosperous cultivation. These materials were remembered, not documented. Cather told the reviewer for the Bookman:

If I had made notes, or should make them now, the material collected would be dead. No, it's memory—the memory that goes with the vocation. When I sit down to write, turns of phrase I've forgotten for years come back like white ink before fire. I think that most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen. That's the important period: when one's not writing. Those years determine whether one's work will be poor and thin or rich and fine.

(Bohlke 20)

Cather's approach to her materials is suggested by the epigraph to O Pioneers!, which is from Adam Mickiewicz's Pan Tadeusz, an epic poem first published in 1834. It reads simply “Those fields, colored by various grain!”² but evokes the long perspective of the history and literature of the Old World. Pan Tadeusz, a narrative about the old order in Polish Lithuania, is a nostalgic account of a courteous way of life lived close to the land. Cather used it perhaps to signal continuity between old and new civilizations, but she probably also used it to indicate an aesthetic approach to a similar subject: that is, rural labors, youthful romance, the role of the church, the love of one's country. Like Mickiewicz, Cather was remembering her early life as a work of art. She wrote to Sergeant that the people and places she knew in Nebraska continued on for her like scenes from War and Peace, always more dramatic and interesting than anything she could have invented (10 August 1914).

The influence of Russian literature is especially strong in Cather's early work. In a letter to H. L. Mencken, Cather writes that when she was fourteen she came upon four of Tolstoy's works—Anna Karenina, The Cossacks, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, and The Kreutzer Sonata—and for the next three years read them over and over again. She says that this reading so strongly colored the way she saw her own world in America that she eventually turned to a long apprenticeship with Henry James and Mrs. Wharton to get over it. Yet in writing O Pioneers!, she wonders if she has really recovered from the Russian influence (6 February 1922). What the Russian writers gave her, especially Tolstoy and Turgenev, was a precedent for the artistic treatment of great continental plains—the lands of wheat fields and pastures and meadows, great expanses of sky, and climatic extremes. Just as she maintained of O Pioneers! that the land was the hero, of Russian literature she said that there “the earth speaks louder than the people” (Bohlke 170). The Russian writers also gave her a precedent for the presentation of an immigrant folk, a peasantry. In O Pioneers! we see a people at their labors and at play together, experiencing joys and sorrows that are communal: the French church fair, the grain harvest, the mourning of the people for Amédée Chevalier, the confirmation service. In this stylized presentation of a land and its people, Cather's Nebraska experience and her reading fuse together as dynamic elements of her art.

O Pioneers! is dedicated to the memory of Sarah Orne Jewett, and this dedication directs the reader to another important influence on Cather's art. The tribute is a meaningful one because it was Jewett who advised Cather that the things “which haunt the mind for years” are the proper material for serious literature (Bohlke 9). Cather had written Alexander's Bridge according to the popular literary interests and conventions of her day, but the unfashionable story of Nebraska immigrants was one she had wanted to write for a long time. “Don't try to write the kind of short story that this or that magazine wants,” said Jewett. “Write the truth, and let them take it or leave it” (Bohlke 11). Cather met Jewett in February 1908 at the home of Mrs. James T. Fields, widow of the Boston publisher. The friendship lasted only sixteen months, cut short by Jewett's death at the age of sixty, but it was one of the most important factors in Cather's literary development (see O'Brien 334-63). A writer in the pastoral mode and a woman, Jewett was for Cather a model of the woman as artist. Jewett had written about the landscape and people of Maine in a way that Cather would do of Nebraska. When Cather edited a collection of Jewett's best stories in the twenties, she wrote of The Country of the Pointed Firs that the sketches in that book were “living things caught in the open, with light and freedom and air-spaces about them. They melt into the land and the life of the land until they are not stories at all, but life itself” (On Writing 49). This is a good account of what Cather succeeded in doing herself in O Pioneers!

When she was interviewed for the Philadelphia Record shortly after the novel's publication, Cather described the intellectual excitement she had felt as a girl after watching the immigrant women at their baking and butter making: “I used to ride home in the most unreasonable state of excitement; I always felt as if they told me so much more than they said—as if I had actually got inside another person's skin” (Bohlke 10). Years later, again in her celebration of Jewett's work, Cather described something similar that could be likened to Keats's “negative capability.” Describing the artist's relation to his work she wrote, “If he achieves anything noble, anything enduring, it must be by giving himself absolutely to his material. And this gift of sympathy is his great gift; it is the fine thing in him that alone can make his work fine. He fades away into the land and people of his heart, he dies of love only to be born again” (On Writing 51).

These lines could also describe the poetry of Walt Whitman, whose “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” provided Cather with her title. Certain lines of Whitman's poem anticipate scenes in the novel:

          Life's involv'd and varied pageants,
All the forms and shows, all the workmen at their work,
All the seamen and the landsmen, all the masters with
                    their slaves,
          Pioneers! O pioneers!
          All the hapless silent lovers,
All the prisoners in the prisons, all the righteous and
                    the wicked,
All the joyous, all the sorrowing, all the living, all
                              the dying,
                    Pioneers! O pioneers!

(lines 61-68)

Reference to Whitman's poem sounds the epic theme that is taken up in Cather's poem “Prairie Spring,” written in Whitman's free-verse manner and placed like an epigraph at the opening of the text. For O Pioneers!, like Whitman's poem, celebrates the dynamic growth of the American democracy as experienced by the immigrant settlers of the pioneer west. It also embodies the Emersonian transcendentalism that reverberates through Whitman's “Song of Myself.” If Whitman's readers ask where the dead have gone, he assures them that “they are alive and well somewhere / The smallest sprout shows there is really no death” (sec. 6, lines 27-28); and if the readers ask specifically after the poet, he says, “I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, / If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles” (sec. 52, lines 9-10). Cather evokes this same transcendental theme in the final rhythmic lines of her story: “They went into the house together, leaving the Divide behind them, under the evening star. Fortunate country, that is one day to receive hearts like Alexandra's into its bosom, to give them out again in the yellow wheat, in the rustling corn, in the shining eyes of youth!” (274).

PUBLICATION AND RECEPTION

Cather signed a contract for O Pioneers! with Houghton Mifflin on March 29, 1913, and the book was published June 28, 1913 (Crane 30). Whether she offered it to McClure's Magazine for serialization is not known, but it was not published in magazine form. When she sent the manuscript to Elizabeth Sergeant, she requested that Sergeant pass it on to an American agent in Paris who might get a translation for it, but apparently the agent turned it down (Sergeant 92-93). William Heinemann, however, published the book simultaneously in England, which pleased Cather a great deal because she had met Heinemann several times in London when she was on the editorial staff for McClure's and she had a very high opinion of his taste and judgment.

When Cather wrote about O Pioneers! in her essay “My First Novels,” she claimed that a New York critic voiced a general opinion, saying, “I simply don't care a damn what happens in Nebraska, no matter who writes about it” (94). Perhaps she was thinking back to the review by Frederick Taber Cooper in the Bookman, who found the novel very regional, slow-moving, and “frankly depressing.” Although he commended the author on her gift of observation, he says, “Somehow the reader cannot bring himself to care keenly whether the young neighbour returns or not, whether Alexandra is eventually happy or not,—whether, indeed, the farm itself prospers or not.” He found the whole thing predictable, loosely constructed, and boring (Murphy 112-13).

Cooper's review, however, was an exception; most of the reviews were enthusiastic. The notice in the Boston Evening Transcript said that with O Pioneers! Cather introduced a new kind of story and a new part of the country into American fiction, commending especially Cather's disclosure of the splendid resources of the immigrant population and the changing face of the country (16 July 1913). Similarly, the reviewer for the New York Herald Tribune was impressed by the originality and significance of Cather's subject matter: “With a steady hand this author holds up the mirror of fiction to a people of our land little, if at all, seen therein before: the Scandinavian and Bohemian pioneers. … In her clear, smooth glass, we see these Old World pioneers adapting themselves to new conditions, identifying themselves with the prairie soil and becoming a voice in our national life. … This is a novel of considerable substance” (18 July 1913). The review in the Nation began with “Few American novels of recent years have impressed us so strongly as this” and concluded on the same high note of praise: “The sureness of feeling and touch, the power without strain, which mark this book, lift it far above the ordinary product of contemporary novelists” (14 September 1913). The reviewer for the Boston Evening Transcript had also made an acute observation on the book's artistry: “The novel has great dramatic power; it is deep, thrilling, intense—and this intensity comes through the simplicity—one might almost say severity, of treatment.”

The notice in the New York Times Book Review would surely have interested and pleased the author, for it echoed some of the things that Cather had written to her friends while composing the novel. As importantly as the characters, the reviewer writes, “looms large the earth, the land, patient and bountiful source of all things.” The reviewer praises Cather for this attitude, which, he says, is not characteristically American:

The average American does not have any deep instinct for the land or vital consciousness of the value and dignity of the life that may be lived upon it. But O Pioneers! is filled with this instinct and consciousness. It is a tale of the old wood and field worshipping races, Swedes and Bohemians transplanted to the uplands of Nebraska, and of their struggle with the untamed soil. … A thread of symbolism runs through it, in which the goddess of fertility once more subdues the barren and stubborn earth.

(30 November 1913)

The most valuable review perhaps, for Cather's career, appeared in the Chicago Evening Post. There Floyd Dell, who would later become a novelist of some note himself, wrote that O Pioneers! was “touched with genius” and was “worthy of being recognized as the most vital, subtle, and artistic piece of the year's fiction.” He despaired, however, of being able to explain to his readers why the novel impressed him so much, because it didn't deal with any large ideas, nor did it dazzle by means of style. In this long review Dell recounted much of the novel's plot, pointing out as well that it is an ordinary story, yet the novel somehow has, in his estimation, richness, charm, and dignity. He urged the American Academy of Arts and Letters to justify its existence by recognizing and acclaiming this early production of genius by Willa Cather (Dell, 25 July 1913).

There was also a good notice in the Lincoln Journal, which described the novel as true to life, “at once homely and beautiful and strange” (3 August 1913). Cather seems to have responded to this review when interviewed for the Philadelphia Record a week later:

What has pleased me most in the cordial reception the West has given this new book of mine, is that the reviewers in all those Western States say the thing seems to them true to the country and the people. That is a great satisfaction. The reviews have concerned themselves a good deal more with the subject matter of the story than with my way of telling it, and I am glad of that. I care a lot more about the country and the people than I care about my own way of writing or anybody else's way of writing.

(Bohlke 11)

She did of course think about the book's structure and style a great deal, for this novel's success represented a significant turning point in her artistic development. But in this case she found that structure was something dictated by the subject and was not a matter of literary conventions. In “My First Novels” she wrote that being in the West for six months in 1912, in a part of the country and among people she really cared about, changed her point of view. She no longer felt the need to write according to prescription. In writing O Pioneers!, she ignored all the conventional situations and accents that were then thought necessary. This was a story without action, humor, or a conventional hero—“a story concerned entirely with heavy farming people, with cornfields and pasture lands and pig yards” (94). And in her 1922 preface to Alexander's Bridge she said that when a writer begins to work with his own material “he has less and less power of choice about the moulding of it. It seems to be there of itself, already moulded.” The writer contrives “only as regards mechanical details, and questions of effective presentation, always debatable. About the essential matter of his story he cannot argue” (viii-ix). Elizabeth Sergeant's one criticism of O Pioneers!, when she read it in manuscript, concerned structure; she felt that the book had no strong, definite skeleton. Cather agreed, but defended this lack of structure on the grounds that the country she was writing about was itself soft and fluid; there were no rocks or mountain ridges (22 April 1913). The book's critical and popular success encouraged Cather to follow this road again in the writing of My Ántonia.

The enthusiastic response to O Pioneers! by generations of readers in this century was anticipated in 1913 by readers to whom Elizabeth Sergeant showed the novel in manuscript form. One was an old Bostonian with wide-ranging intellectual interests. She told Sergeant that the book made her very proud, as an American, to think that the European immigrants, with their own culture and ideals, had so quickly blended their lives with the soil of Nebraska. More importantly, she praised the author for creating “such rare and measured visual images” of this new world with its “almost cosmic vistas, overtones, and undertones.” She marveled that “though the story unfolded with deceptive simplicity, it had majesty, even terror.” The author, she told Sergeant, “seemed to be looking through objective lenses at something new God had made” (Sergeant 95-96). The other readers were the widow and family of the French medieval scholar Gaston Paris, with whom Sergeant was then living in France. After dinner Sergeant would read the manuscript out loud when the women gathered about the salon fire for an hour of needlework and conversation. “Très original,” they thought. Although no French woman for centuries had seen virgin soil, they were thrilled by this account of the birth of a new country. They said to Sergeant, “We French who love the land, have it in our bones, can see the quality of her writing.” Alexandra's return from the river farms singing a Swedish hymn, sure of the future of wheat on the Divide, was a scene they felt belonged to poetry and legend (Sergeant 93).

That is how Cather's readers have continued to view the book, as a unique and poetic blending of New World experience and Old World cultural and literary traditions, as a myth-making text (see Woodress in The Art of Willa Cather 43-62). Alexandra exists wholly and specifically in her relation to the farm on the Divide, but when she finally makes it yield its bounty, she becomes a larger-than-life figure of myth, a corn goddess. The moment when she envisions the future stirring under the shaggy ridges of the Divide is described, as Sergeant's Boston friend observed, in almost cosmic language:

Her face was so radiant. … For the first time, perhaps, since that land emerged from the waters of geologic ages, a human face was set toward it with love and yearning. It seemed beautiful to her, rich and strong and glorious. Her eyes drank in the breadth of it, until her tears blinded her. Then the Genius of the Divide, the great, free spirit which breathes across it, must have bent lower than it ever bent to a human will before. The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.

(64)

When Carl Linstrum, who will eventually marry Alexandra, comes back to the Divide and sees what Alexandra and his old neighbors have made out of the land, he says, “Is n't it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before” (110). The two stories woven together in O Pioneers! stretch back to Genesis. Alexandra's is the story of creation, the story of a human civilization being shaped out of a land as flat and formless as the sea. Emil and Marie's is the story of lovers cast from the earth's garden through sin. The timeless, ever-recurring nature of these stories is secured by literary allusion. Alexandra's heroic character and actions are enriched by her connection with the old Swedish legends of Tegner's Frithiofs Saga. Emil and Marie's story acquires a universal pathos by its association with Ovid's story of Pyramus and Thisbe, whose blood stains the fruit of the white mulberry tree. And there is a suggestion of the Endymion story when Marie resolves in the moonlight that to dream of her lover will henceforth be enough. There are hidden but strong parallels between characters and episodes in O Pioneers! and Virgil's Eclogues (see Rosowski 46-48, 60-61). The two stories of the novel are brought together in a nexus of creation and destruction as Alexandra's servant, old Ivar, repeats to himself Psalm 101, a song of “mercy and judgment” in which the psalmist promises to remember the faithful of the land and to destroy all evil doers.

When she wrote O Pioneers! Willa Cather achieved what Virgil wrote of in those lines that she quoted in My Ántonia, “Primus ego in patriam mecum … deducam Musas,” and which she translated as “I shall be the first, if I live, to bring the Muse into my country” (264). O Pioneers! was not Willa Cather's first published novel, but it was certainly the novel in which she first brought the muse into her country.

Notes

1. Reproduced in facsimile in Mildred Bennett's The World of Willa Cather (222-23). Yance Sorgensen, originally from Norway, was a prosperous Nebraska farmer who refused to modernize his home, preferring the old way of doing things (see Bennett 200).

2. Cather apparently altered the 1885 English translation by Maude Ashurst Biggs, which reads “those fields, rich hued with various grain.” For a discussion of Cather and Mickiewicz, see Slote 12-16.

Works Cited

Bennett, Mildred. The World of Willa Cather. 1951. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1961.

Bohlke, L. Brent, ed. Willa Cather in Person: Interviews, Speeches, and Letters. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1986.

Brown, E. K., completed by Leon Edel. Willa Cather: A Critical Biography. 1953. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1987.

Cather, Willa. Letter to H. L. Mencken. 6 Feb. 1922. Enoch Pratt Library, Baltimore.

———. Letters to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant. Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.

———. My Ántonia. 1918. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977.

———. “My First Novels [There Were Two].” On Writing 89-98.

———. On Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art. 1949. New York: Knopf, 1968.

———. “Preface” to Alexander's Bridge. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1922.

Crane, Joan. Willa Cather: A Bibliography. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1982.

Dell, Floyd. Rev. of O Pioneers! Chicago Evening Post 25 July 1913. Rpt. in part in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Documentary Series. Vol. I. Detroit: Gale Research Co. 1982, 67-69.

Lewis, Edith. Willa Cather Living: A Personal Record. 1953. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1976.

Murphy, John J., ed. Critical Essays on Willa Cather. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984.

O'Brien, Sharon. Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice. New York: Oxford U P, 1987.

Rev. of O Pioneers! Boston Evening Transcript 16 July 1913: 18.

———. Lincoln Journal 3 Aug. 1913, sec. a: 7.

———. Nation 14 Sept. 1913: 210-11.

———. New York Herald Tribune 18 July 1913: 8.

———. New York Times Book Review 30 Nov. 1913: 664.

Rosowski, Susan J. The Voyage Perilous: Willa Cather's Romanticism. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1986.

Sergeant, Elizabeth Shepley. Willa Cather: A Memoir. 1953. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1963.

Slote, Bernice. “The Secret Web.” Five Essays on Willa Cather: The Merrimack Symposium. Ed. John J. Murphy. North Andover: Merrimack College, 1974.

Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. Philadelphia: McKay, 1891-92.

Woodress, James. “Willa Cather: American Experience and European Tradition.” The Art of Willa Cather. Ed. Bernice Slote and Virginia Faulkner. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1974.

———. Willa Cather: A Literary Life. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1963.