SOURCE: Hively, Evelyn Helmick. “O Pioneers! In Sacred Fire: Willa Cather's Novel Cycle, pp. 37-49. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1994.

In the following essay, Hively views O Pioneers! from a mythological and cultural perspective.

The first novel of the frontier, O Pioneers!, was begun certainly with Whitman's poem in mind. The young Willa Cather thought Whitman somewhat ridiculous, but admired him because “there is a primitive elemental force about him.” Alluding to him seems appropriate at the beginning of the first stage of the cycle for that reason and because, as she had said in the same essay, “He is so full of hardiness and of the joy of life. He looks at all nature in the delighted, admiring way in which the old Greeks and the primitive poets did” (KA,352). But for the classicist Erich Auerbach, the distinctive vocative form that the title uses recalls a...