O Pioneers!

O Pioneers! is a 1913 novel by the American writer Willa Cather and her second published novel, written while she was living in New York. Its title comes from Walt Whitman's poem Pioneers! O Pioneers!, and it is set on the Nebraska prairie.

Alexandra Bergson is the eldest child of a family that has come from Sweden to farm the Divide, a hard stretch of land that other settlers are abandoning. When her father dies she takes over the farm against the expectations of her brothers, buys more land and works out how to hold it, and the novel follows the family over the years that follow before shifting to the next generation and to Alexandra's own attachments.

Cather wrote the book from her own childhood in Nebraska, and it is the first of her novels about the prairie. It is usually read with My Antonia and the later books in the same sequence, it is the one that establishes the land as her subject, and its last section moves forward years and changes the question the book has been asking.