SOURCE: Stouck, David. “O Pioneers!: Willa Cather and the Epic Imagination.” Prairie Schooner 46, no. 1 (spring 1972): 23-32.

In the following essay, Stouck considers O Pioneers! “in the light of its epic vision and in view of the author's imaginative origins in the Midwest.”

Wright Morris introduces his collection of critical essays, The Territory Ahead (1963), by pointing to that tendency of American writers to “start well then peter out.” His observation is fully substantiated in a discussion of Melville, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway among others. His thesis, however, does not hold with regards to his fellow Nebraskan, Willa Cather, whose finest fiction, Death Comes for the Archbishop, was written relatively late in her career (the author was then fifty-three). Moreover, Willa Cather's imagination, unlike that of her more flamboyant contemporaries, was always in the process of evolving in terms of its emotional needs and aesthetic expression. Miss Cather's four most accomplished...