O Pioneers!
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40 free O Pioneers! trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
O Pioneers! is one of the great American novels of the prairie. First published in 1913, it follows Alexandra Bergson, a farmer's daughter who takes charge of a struggling homestead and stakes everything on ground her neighbors are abandoning. Around her story runs a second one, a doomed romance between her youngest brother Emil and the married Marie. This quiz covers the whole book: the opening scene in a wind-battered frontier town, the hard early years, the neighbors and hired hands, the tragedy in the orchard and the quiet ending. There are also questions on the writer behind the novel, the poem that gave it a title, and the television film made from it. It is written for students revising the novel, for book clubs, and for readers who simply want to see how much they remember. The opening rounds stick to the main characters and events, and the later ones reach for the details that make a hard quiz. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
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Q 01O Pioneers! takes its title from a poem celebrating westward settlers by which American poet?
Walt Whitman
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.
Q 02In the opening scene of O Pioneers!, what does a neighbor boy rescue from a telegraph pole?
A kitten
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.
Q 03O Pioneers! follows the Bergson family as they farm the windswept prairie of which American state?
Nebraska
Nebraska is where the novelist herself arrived at age nine, and the immigrant farm families she grew up among shaped much of her fiction.
Q 04Which eventual Pulitzer Prize winner wrote the prairie story O Pioneers! as her second novel?
Willa Cather
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.
Q 05In O Pioneers!, Alexandra Bergson's parents settled the prairie as immigrants of which nationality?
Swedish
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.
Q 06In O Pioneers!, which jealous husband shoots Emil Bergson and Marie together in an orchard?
Frank Shabata
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.
Q 07Which actress earned a Golden Globe nomination as Alexandra Bergson in the 1992 TV film O Pioneers!?
Jessica Lange
Jessica Lange starred opposite David Strathairn in the film, which first aired in February 1992; her nomination came at the 1993 Golden Globes.
Q 08In O Pioneers!, what does Alexandra talk her brothers into doing when drought drives neighbors away?
Borrow and buy more acres
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.
Q 09Which barefoot hermit in O Pioneers! lives in a clay-bank dugout and doctors sick animals?
Ivar
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.
Q 10Which childhood friend, back from the goldfields, does Alexandra agree to marry as O Pioneers! ends?
Carl Linstrum
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.
Q 11Which novel narrated by Jim Burden completed the Prairie Trilogy that began with O Pioneers!?
My Ántonia
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.
Q 12Which tree names Part IV of O Pioneers!, the orchard spot where Emil and Marie last meet?
White mulberry
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.
Q 13In O Pioneers!, where does Alexandra's oldest friend go to hunt gold after his city career fails?
Alaska
Q 21What is the name of the little prairie town where O Pioneers! opens on a windy January day?
Hanover
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.
Q 22In O Pioneers!, in which city does Alexandra visit her brother's killer in the state penitentiary?
Lincoln
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.
Q 23In O Pioneers!, which profession does Emil Bergson plan to train for at a university in Michigan?
The law
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.
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.
Q 14In O Pioneers!, what weapon does Marie's husband take from his closet before walking to the orchard?
A rifle
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.
Q 15In O Pioneers!, which country does Emil Bergson travel to in an effort to forget Marie?
Mexico
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.
Q 16What name does O Pioneers! give the high prairie tableland where the Bergson family homesteads?
The Divide
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.
Q 17In O Pioneers!, which crop does Alexandra plant heavily before her corn-growing neighbors follow?
Wheat
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.
Q 18In O Pioneers!, which animals is Alexandra advised to keep clean as disease sweeps nearby farms?
Hogs
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.
Q 19In O Pioneers!, Marie Tovesky and her family belong to which immigrant community of the prairie?
Bohemian
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.
Q 20In O Pioneers!, what sudden illness kills Emil's best friend Amédée in the middle of harvest?
Appendicitis
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.
Q 24At the French church supper in O Pioneers!, what is Marie doing inside her tent of shawls?
Telling fortunes
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.
Q 25In O Pioneers!, what happens to Alexandra in the daydream that has visited her since girlhood?
She is carried across fields
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.
Q 26In the closing pages of O Pioneers!, Alexandra declares that the land belongs to what?
The future
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.
Q 27Which first novel by the author of O Pioneers! follows a married man torn between Boston and London?
Alexander's Bridge
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.
Q 28The author of O Pioneers! won the Pulitzer Prize for which novel set during World War I?
One of Ours
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.
Q 29The author of O Pioneers! was born in which eastern state before moving to the prairie at nine?
Virginia
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.
Q 30Which small town, girlhood home of the author of O Pioneers!, has a historic district in her name?
Red Cloud
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.