SOURCE: Rosowski, Susan J. “Willa Cather—A Pioneer in Art: O Pioneers! and My Ántonia.” Prairie Schooner 55, nos. 1-2 (spring-summer 1981): 141-54.

In the following essay, Rosowski analyzes the role of separation and alienation in O Pioneers! and My Ántonia.

Nebraska and great literature seem, as Willa Cather once acknowledged, an unlikely combination, for “as everyone knows, Nebraska is distinctly déclassé as a literary background; its very name throws the delicately attuned critic into a clammy shiver of embarrassment.”¹ Yet Cather, a writer of the very first rank, wrote of Nebraska. For over fifty years, readers have been fascinated by this fact, taking varied approaches to the question of how Cather's regionalism relates to her greatness. Scholars have used history and biography to explain the changes in Cather's attitude to the Great Plains; literary critics have interpreted these changes in her works.² Critics now agree that Cather's coming...