O Pioneers!
By Willa Cather
Aashka Jhaveri
7B
January 23, 2017 O Pioneers!, written by Willa Cather, was her first book, which was about a prairie lifestyle. When she was in college, Willa Cather first had an interest in studying medicine, but after one of her stories she wrote in writing class got published, she found an interest in writing. After graduating college, she got a job as a high school English teacher and wrote short stories during that time. The short stories she wrote were noticed by the owner of McClure’s Magazine, S. S. McClure, who hired her. After five years she started writing her own books, and the first few, such as O Pioneers were about the destruction of pioneering tradition. Alexandra Bergson, one of the main characters in O Pioneers!, portrays an American pioneer who stays strong mentally and does not give up. An argument to go against the thesis would be that Alexandra is a woman who does not stay strong mentally because after Emil died, she did not want to do anything. She felt almost depressed that her hard work, which was so Emil could go to college and become a businessperson, had all crumbled because Emil died. Once both Emil and Marie were gone, Alexandra could only talk to Ivar and Signa, so she started feeling lonely and was longing for Carl to
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She always believed that she could farm on the land no matter what others said; she did not even listen to two of her brothers, Lou and Oscar. In doing this, she eventually makes the farm profitable after inheriting the farm from her father, John Bergson. Lou and Oscar were like their neighbors; they stuck to tradition and objected Alexandra’s ideas that were different. Alexandra, ready to try new methods of farming, was open-minded, yet her brothers were close-minded, not wanting to anything but tradition. Alexandra knew that sometimes traditions