SOURCE: Murphy, John J. “A Comprehensive View of Cather's O Pioneers!” In Critical Essays on Willa Cather, pp. 113-27. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1984.

In the following essay, Murphy applies different critical perspectives to O Pioneers!

The dual nature of Willa Cather's O Pioneers! (1913) has occupied its critics from the beginning, from bookman reviewer Frederick Taber Cooper's backhanded admiration for Emil and Marie's passionate affair as a vivid touch of Maupassant unfortunately outside the plodding main story to more thoughtful considerations by subsequent generations.¹ Cather herself described her work as a “two-part pastoral” developed from two stories—the earlier one titled “Alexandra” and the later “The White Mulberry Tree” and agreed with Elizabeth Sergeant that lack of a sharp skelton was a weakness.² The contrasting moods of the two seminal stories she announced in “Prairie Spring,” a poem included after the title and dedicatory pages of O Pioneers...