Many Americans have little understanding about farm life. We enjoy and need the food they produce but have no appreciation on the struggles and sacrifices farmers make everyday. In order to better connect, Harvest Home will recommend novels for our supporters to read. We want to make the farm to table experience meaningful and what better way, than to connect with some of America’s great novelists. Our first writer is the legendary Willa Cather and her novel O Pioneers!
O Pioneers! is a 1913 novel by American author Willa Cather. It was written in part when Cather was living in Cherry Valley, New York with Isabelle McClungand was completed at the McClungs’ home in Pittsburgh.
O Pioneers! tells the story of the Bergsons, a family of Swedish immigrants in the farm country near the fictional town of Hanover, Nebraska, at the turn of the 20th century. The main character, Alexandra Bergson, inherits the family farmland when her father dies, and she devotes her life to making the farm a viable enterprise at a time when other immigrant families are giving up and leaving the prairie. The novel is also concerned with two romantic relationships, one between Alexandra and family friend Carl Linstrum and another between Alexandra’s brother Emil and the married Marie Shabata.
Savor the Season Uptown! 