40 Fun Facts About O Pioneers!

O Pioneers! takes its title from a poem celebrating westward settlers by which American poet?

Walt Whitman published the poem in 1865, and it was later folded into Leaves of Grass. A reading of it resurfaced in 2009 as the voice-over for a Levi's jeans campaign.

In the opening scene of O Pioneers!, what does a neighbor boy rescue from a telegraph pole?

A kitten belonging to five-year-old Emil has been chased up the pole by a dog, and it will not budge until the older boy climbs to the very top.

O Pioneers! follows the Bergson family as they farm the windswept prairie of which American state?

Nebraska is where the novelist herself arrived at age nine, and the immigrant farm families she grew up among shaped much of her fiction.

Which eventual Pulitzer Prize winner wrote the prairie story O Pioneers! as her second novel?

Willa Cather wrote it while living in New York, far from the prairie of her girlhood. She said she simply gave herself up to recapturing people and places she had forgotten.

In O Pioneers!, Alexandra Bergson's parents settled the prairie as immigrants of which nationality?

Swedish girls later fill Alexandra's kitchen too: once she prospers, she pays their fares over from the old country to work in her house.

In O Pioneers!, which jealous husband shoots Emil Bergson and Marie together in an orchard?

Frank Shabata fires three times in a drunken rage, then flees to Omaha and gives himself up to the police. The judge hands him the full sentence of ten years.

Which actress earned a Golden Globe nomination as Alexandra Bergson in the 1992 TV film O Pioneers!?

Jessica Lange starred opposite David Strathairn in the film, which first aired in February 1992; her nomination came at the 1993 Golden Globes.

In O Pioneers!, what does Alexandra talk her brothers into doing when drought drives neighbors away?

Her answer is to borrow and buy more acres, a gamble she takes after touring the richer river farms. By the novel's second part the Bergson farms are prosperous.

Which barefoot hermit in O Pioneers! lives in a clay-bank dugout and doctors sick animals?

Ivar believes in killing no living thing and bans guns from his place. When he later loses his land, Alexandra takes him in, and she refuses to let him be sent to an asylum.

Which childhood friend, back from the goldfields, does Alexandra agree to marry as O Pioneers! ends?

Carl Linstrum reads of the Bergson tragedy in a month-old San Francisco newspaper and sets out at once, traveling day and night by the fastest boats and trains he can catch.

Which novel narrated by Jim Burden completed the Prairie Trilogy that began with O Pioneers!?

My Ántonia followed The Song of the Lark to round out the three books. F. Scott Fitzgerald once lamented that The Great Gatsby was a failure by comparison.

Which tree names Part IV of O Pioneers!, the orchard spot where Emil and Marie last meet?

White mulberry branches shade an old wagon seat in the corner of Marie's orchard, and by the next morning the fruit that fell there in the night is stained dark.

In O Pioneers!, where does Alexandra's oldest friend go to hunt gold after his city career fails?

Alaska is his last gamble: he stops at the Bergson farm on his way to Seattle, and stays far longer than the few days he planned.

In O Pioneers!, what weapon does Marie's husband take from his closet before walking to the orchard?

A rifle, his Winchester, is in his hands only because he likes to feel desperate; he sets out with no real purpose of using it.

In O Pioneers!, which country does Emil Bergson travel to in an effort to forget Marie?

Mexico keeps him away until the following June, and he comes home with a guitar and a costume from his travels, but with his feelings unchanged.

What name does O Pioneers! give the high prairie tableland where the Bergson family homesteads?

The Divide is treated almost as a character: the narrator speaks of its Genius, a great free spirit that bends to Alexandra's will as it never had for anyone before.

In O Pioneers!, which crop does Alexandra plant heavily before her corn-growing neighbors follow?

Wheat took her three big harvests to prove: only then did the neighbors stop planting nothing but corn. Her brother Lou had cried over the first planting.

In O Pioneers!, which animals is Alexandra advised to keep clean as disease sweeps nearby farms?

Hogs, she is told, do not like to be filthy: she should fence a sorghum patch and give them clean water. Her brothers scoff, but she starts planning the move.

In O Pioneers!, Marie Tovesky and her family belong to which immigrant community of the prairie?

Bohemian men roar with laughter in the store where little Marie first charms a crowd, and years later she sends to Omaha for a dress her father brought from the old country.

In O Pioneers!, what sudden illness kills Emil's best friend Amédée in the middle of harvest?

Appendicitis is operated on too late: the doctors say it should have been done three days earlier. The loss of his friend pushes Emil and Marie to face what they feel.

What is the name of the little prairie town where O Pioneers! opens on a windy January day?

Hanover is introduced as a cluster of low drab buildings trying not to be blown away, with a mist of fine snowflakes curling around them under a gray sky.

In O Pioneers!, in which city does Alexandra visit her brother's killer in the state penitentiary?

Lincoln is also where Emil went to university, and walking past the campus Alexandra finds a polite student who reminds her of him. Inside the prison she promises to seek a pardon.

In O Pioneers!, which profession does Emil Bergson plan to train for at a university in Michigan?

The law is his way out: he is to read in an Omaha office over the summer, then enter the school at Ann Arbor in October. He never gets there.

At the French church supper in O Pioneers!, what is Marie doing inside her tent of shawls?

Telling fortunes is her job for the evening, and the young priest goes first. Later the boys switch off the electric lights, and in the dark Emil kisses her for the first time.

In O Pioneers!, what happens to Alexandra in the daydream that has visited her since girlhood?

In the vision she is carried across fields by a figure larger and swifter than anyone she knows, yellow like sunlight. After each one she douses herself with cold well water.

In the closing pages of O Pioneers!, Alexandra declares that the land belongs to what?

The future owns it, she says: people come and go, and those who love and understand the land hold it only for a little while.

Which first novel by the author of O Pioneers! follows a married man torn between Boston and London?

Alexander's Bridge ran as a magazine serial in 1912, and its author soon judged it weak and shallow. Her next book turned to the prairie she knew.

The author of O Pioneers! won the Pulitzer Prize for which novel set during World War I?

One of Ours took the 1923 prize, though Ernest Hemingway sneered in a letter that its battle scene had been lifted from the film The Birth of a Nation.

The author of O Pioneers! was born in which eastern state before moving to the prairie at nine?

Virginia was home until 1883, when the family left partly to escape the tuberculosis then rampant there. Her father farmed for just 18 months before moving into town.

Which small town, girlhood home of the author of O Pioneers!, has a historic district in her name?

Red Cloud, named for the Oglala Lakota leader, reappears in her fiction as the town of Black Hawk, and some of her early articles ran in its local newspaper.

Which New York magazine hired the author of O Pioneers! as an editor and serialized her first novel?

McClure's kept her in Boston for most of 1907, writing a series of exposés about the religious leader Mary Baker Eddy that was credited to another journalist.

In O Pioneers!, Lou Bergson blusters about which politician who gave Wall Street a scare in 1896?

William Jennings Bryan ran for president three times without winning. Lou asks his visitor what New York thinks of him and boasts that the West is only getting started.

Which actress made her film debut in a small role as Marie in the 1992 TV film O Pioneers!?

Anne Heche took the part of the doomed neighbor, while Heather Graham played the young Alexandra in the film's early scenes.

In O Pioneers!, which trade does Alexandra's oldest friend learn after his family quits the prairie?

Engraving leaves him disillusioned: he admits to Alexandra that he has spent his years copying other men's pictures while she stayed home and made her own.

Before homesteading the prairie in O Pioneers!, where had Alexandra's father John Bergson worked?

In a shipyard, which left him as green as his neighbors: many settlers had been tailors, locksmiths or joiners at home and had never worked a farm before.

The deaths of Emil and Marie under an orchard tree in O Pioneers! echo which lovers from Ovid?

Pyramus and Thisbe also die at a secret meeting place under a tree, and in Ovid's version the gods change the color of its fruit in memory of them.

The epigraph of O Pioneers! is a line from Pan Tadeusz, the national epic of which country?

Poland's epic was written by Adam Mickiewicz and first published in Paris in 1834; the line quoted here pictures farmland colored by different kinds of grain.

O Pioneers! is dedicated to the memory of which Maine writer who mentored its author?

Sarah Orne Jewett, author of The Country of the Pointed Firs, had urged her younger friend to write about her own country. The prairie story that followed was the result.

In O Pioneers!, which kitchen task is almost a mania with Alexandra's mother, Mrs. Bergson?

Making preserves keeps her to old-country routines: she roams the creek banks for fox grapes and goose plums, and once the fruit runs out she starts pickling.

In O Pioneers!, which adventure novel does Alexandra read aloud to her mother and Emil after supper?

The Swiss Family Robinson soon pulls the two young men at the table away from their game of checkers to listen. The narrator calls them all big children together.