O PIONEERS! One of America™s greatest women writers, Willa Cather established her talent and her reputation with this extraordinary novel”the first of her books set on the Nebraska frontier. A tale of the prairie land encountered by America™s Swedish, Czech, Bohemian, and French immigrants, as well as a story of how the land challenged them, changed them, and, in some cases, defeated them, Cather™s novel is a uniquely American epic. Alexandra Bergson, a young Swedish immigrant girl who inherits her father™s farm and must transform it from raw prairie into a prosperous enterprise, is the first of Cather™s great heroines”all of them women of strong will and an even stronger desire to overcome adversity and succeed. But the wild land itself is an equally important character in Cather™s books, and her descriptions of it are so evocative, lush, and moving that they provoked writer Rebecca West to say of her: The most sensuous of writers, Willa Cather builds her imagined world almost as solidly as our five senses build the universe around us.Willa Cather, perhaps more than any other American writer, was able to re-create the real drama of the pioneers, capturing for later generations a time, a place, and a spirit that has become part of our national heritage.From the Paperback edition.