O Pioneers!

"It was a revelation. America! America? Yes, America! The American pioneer experience as an immigrant experience! ... Beauty and despair are so physical."

"Nebraska is the quintessential Great Plains state. If you drive across America, or go by train, you hurry through it as fast as you can and think it is no more than grass lands and corn fields. You think there is very little else except for one big city on the eastern side, Omaha – where, incidentally, America’s richest man, Warren Buffett, lives. Two great rivers dominate the state, the North Platte and the Missouri. I have become fascinated with the internals, as it were, of Nebraska. I love the fact that the great migratory routes – the Oregon trail and the Mormon migrations – all passed through it. There is an enormous sandstone pinnacle in the far west of Nebraska called Chimney Rock, a landmark which you can see from 30 miles. It remains unchanged from the times it was a real landmark, over 100 years ago. To me, Nebraska is a fantastically interesting crossroads, and a place where the east-west journeying of America is at its apex. You see the quintessence of pioneering in Nebraska. Willa Cather, who was born there but spent most of her writing life in New York City, felt a keen sense of nostalgia for the very hardscrabble life in the early pioneering days in Nebraska, and has written several books. I think she is one of the greatest of all American women writers. It is difficult to choose a favourite book of hers, but if I had to choose it would be O Pioneers! It’s an extraordinary story of a Swedish family who stepped over the frontier that I was talking about into this raw, untouched and very harsh land. There was no habitation, no cities, roads or anything. You had to start from scratch. They would build sod houses, begin to grow things, raise animals and see whether they could survive through a hard winter. And then they met other people and there was a market, and then came children. “I think she is one of the greatest of all American women writers.” Yes. It is quite extraordinary to see the formation of an American community. You find out about the lives and loves that define that community, and ultimately the crime. There is a famous murder under a mulberry tree. Tremendously so. Of course, it answers to a degree the deep and sincerely felt godliness of Americans. God was all they had to trust, because all the elements of nature worked against them so all they could do was pray and hope for the best. Most of them ultimately survived, got through and succeeded. So a toughness, determination, ambition and underlying godliness very much marks the Midwestern life in America, even to this day."