[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 its accomplishment, absorbed them. The big spaces and big emotions of Western life seemed to them far more interesting and more significant than the snug theory and languid practice of society in the smaller sense of the word. But Norris could not forget the books he had admired, and died before he had outgrown the influence of the French masters of “realism.” Phillips, on the other hand, failed to shake off the pose of the plain blunt man, who thinks that the amenities of life are symptoms of weakness and that all Harvard men are snobs.

Now (in writing this story at least) it is the same big primitive fecund America which engages Miss Cather's imagination. She dwells with unforced emotion upon the suffering and the glory of those who have taught a desert to feed the world. The scene is laid in the prairie land of thirty years ago. The settlement to which we are taken is of some years' standing. The rough work has been done, the land cleared and broken up, sod homesteads built, crops planted—and then (the great test of courage and faith in that land) a succession of dry seasons. The weaker have already abandoned their claims, or lost them by mortgage. Only here and there a strong heart, like that of the heroine of the story, refuses to be discouraged, persists in believing that the country has a future. Her father, though defeated, has died in this faith, bequeathing it to her; so that when the stupid brothers wish to give up the fight, it is she who insists not only upon holding the land they have, but upon buying every acre they can in the thinning neighborhood. The years justify her, bringing wealth to her and to her beloved country. She prospers beyond her dull and penny-wise elder brothers, who nurse a grudge against her accordingly. Her heart she lavishes upon her younger brother, the baby of the family, and she procures for him the advantages of education which shall give him a larger horizon, more flexible interests, than her own. He is a fine lad, manly and responsive, but youth and circumstance prepare a dreadful end for him and for the hapless object of his love. The familiar matter of “rural tragedy” is here. Whether its detail is dwelt upon too ruthlessly is a question which readers will decide according to temperament and individual taste. To us the treatment of the episode seems justified by the mood of tragic emotion which underlies it. As for the bereaved sister, if loneliness has shadowed her youth and tragedy darkened her maturity, there still remains the quiet fulfilment of a long-dreamt-of happiness. The sureness of feeling and touch, the power without strain, which mark this book, lift it far above the ordinary product of contemporary novelists.

NYTBR (14 September 1913)

[In the following essay, the anonymous reviewer offers a positive assessment of O Pioneers!]

The hero of the American novel very often starts on the farm, but he seldom stays there; instead, he uses it as a spring-board from which to plunge into the mysteries of politics or finance. Probably the novel reflects a national tendency. To be sure, after we have carefully separated ourselves from the soil, we are apt to talk a lot about the advantages of a return to it, but in most cases it ends there. The average American does not have any deep instinct for the land, or vital consciousness of the dignity and value of the life that may be lived upon it.

O Pioneers! is filled with this instinct and this consciousness. It is a tale of the old wood-and-field-worshipping races, Swedes and Bohemians, transplanted to Nebraskan uplands, of their struggle with the untamed soil, and their final conquest of it. Miss Cather has written a good story, we hasten to assure the reader who cares for good stories, but she has achieved something even finer. Through a direct, human tale of love and struggle and attainment, a tale that is American in the best sense of the word, there runs a thread of symbolism. It is practically a novel without a hero. There are men in it, but the interest centres in two women—not rivals, but friends, and more especially in the splendid blonde farm-woman, Alexandra.

In this new mythology, which is the old, the goddess of fertility once more subdues the barren and stubborn earth. Possibly some might call it a feminist novel, for the two heroines are stronger, cleverer and better balanced than their husbands and brothers—but we are sure Miss Cather had nothing so inartistic in mind. It is a natural growth, feminine because it is only an expansion of the very essence of femininity. Instead of calling O Pioneers! a novel without a hero, it might be more accurate to call it a novel with three heroines—Alexandra, the harvest-goddess, Marie, poor little spirit of love and youth snatched untimely from her poppy-fields, and the Earth, itself, patient and bountiful source of all things.