The novel that first made Willa Cather famous, O Pioneers! is a powerfully mythic tale of the American frontier told through the life of one extraordinary woman. No other work of fiction so vividly evokes the harsh beauty and epic sweep of the Nebraska prairies that Cather knew and loved. Alexandra Bergson, one of the great heroines of American literature, is a young Swedish immigrant at the turn of the twentieth century who inherits her father's...

Growing up in the 1950s in suburban Minneapolis, Diane Wilson had a family like everybody else's. Her Swedish American father was a salesman at Sears and her mother drove her brothers to baseball practice and went to parent-teacher conferences. But in her thirties, Diane began to wonder why her mother didn't speak of her past. So she traveled to South Dakota and Nebraska, searching out records of her relatives through six generations, hungering to...