Great Plains Trilogy

O Pioneers! is a story of the immigrants who came to America to build new lives for themselves. Struggling against poverty, ignorance, drought, and storm, they came to love and understand the land, until it rewarded them with a richness exceeding all imaginings. The Bergsons are a family of strong-willed Swedish immigrants who have come to make a living on the great prairie. When the father, John, dies, worn out by disease and debt, his eldest daughter, Alexandra, becomes the head of the family. This is the story of her love affair with the land—an American Midwest that is vast and golden.

One January day, many years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away. A mist of fine snowflakes was curling and eddying about the cluster of low drab buildings huddled on the gray prairie, under a gray sky. The dwelling-houses were set about haphazard on the tough prairie sod; some of them looked as if they had been moved in overnight, and others as if they were straying off by themselves, headed straight for the open plain. None of them had any appearance of permanence, and the howling wind blew under them as well as over them. The main street was a deeply rutted road, now frozen hard, which ran from the squat red railway station and the grain "elevator" at the north end of the town to the lumber yard and the horse pond at the south end. On either side of this road straggled two uneven rows of wooden buildings; the general merchandise stores, the two banks, the drug store, the feed store, the saloon, the post-office. The board sidewalks were gray with trampled snow, but at two o'clock in the afternoon the shopkeepers, having come back from dinner, were keeping well behind their frosty windows.

After studying piano as a child, Thea Kronborg leaves her family and their frontier town of Moonstone, Colorado to pursue music in Chicago. There, her instructor insists that her singing voice is her greater gift, and she begins to work on mastering her craft. Seeking to become one of the world's greatest opera singers, she embarks on a journey of self-discovery and fulfillment that takes her across the world. Written in 1915 and featuring lyrical and authentic insights about life on the frontier, this book is the second in Willa Cather's Prairie Trilogy, following O Pioneers! and preceding My Antonia.

Widely recognized as Willa Cather's finest book and one of the outstanding novels of American literature, My Ántonia tells of the life of early American pioneers in Nebraska. Through Jim Burden's endearing, smitten voice, we revisit the remarkable vicissitudes of immigrant life in the Nebraska heartland with all its insistent bonds. Guiding the way are some of literature's most beguiling characters: the Russian brothers plagued by memories of a fateful sleigh ride, Ántonia's desperately homesick father and self-indulgent mother, and the coy Lena Lingard. Holding the pastoral society's heart, of course, is the bewitching, free-spirited Ántonia. Infused with a gracious passion for the land, My Ántonia is a deeply moving portrait of an entire community and its way of life.

Orphaned at the age of 10, Jim Burden moves to Nebraska to live with his grandparents. There he meets Ántonia Shimerda, the daughter of an immigrant family from Bohemia, who have come to carve out a life for themselves in the harsh and bountiful Nebraskan landscape. At the urging of her father, Jim teaches Ántonia English and together they share adventures that will bind them throughout their lives, despite the vicissitudes of time and fate, and years of separation. The final book in Willa Cather's Great Plains trilogy, My Ántonia is a lyrical tribute to the bygone pioneer life and the struggles and successes of America's early settlers.