Q 01/05

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

A) Emily Dickinson

B) Walt Whitman

C) Robert Frost

D) Edgar Allan Poe

Answer · why

B) 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...

Q 02/05

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

A) A squirrel

B) A tame crow

C) A barn owl

D) A kitten

Answer · why

D) 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 03/05

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

A) Nebraska

B) Kansas

C) Minnesota

D) Oklahoma

Answer · why

A) 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 04/05

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

A) Edith Wharton

B) Pearl S. Buck

C) Willa Cather

D) Laura Ingalls Wilder

Answer · why

C) 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 pl...

Q 05/05

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

A) Norwegian

B) Danish

C) German

D) Swedish

Answer · why

D) 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.