书名：O Pioneers! 啊！拓荒者
难度：Lexile蓝思阅读指数930
作者：Willa Cather
出版社名称：Signet Classics
出版时间：2012
语种：英文
ISBN：9780451532121
商品尺寸：10.5 x 1.6 x 17 cm
包装：平装
页数：230

O Pioneers!《啊！拓荒者》是美国杰出女作家Willa Cather（维拉·凯瑟）的成名作。以“拓荒”为背景素材，讲述了一个家庭的发展历程，蕴含着丰富的生态思想。书中塑造了一个伟大的女性形象，表现了作者对女性主义的推崇，同时也是一部赞颂美国边疆地区拓荒者的优秀作品。
推荐理由：
1.经典世界名著，各大推荐书单榜上有名；
2.结合女性主义和生态思想，开创了文学史的先河；
3.英文原版小说，语言简练易懂，适合想要提高英语写作、阅读水平的学生及读者；
4.全书印刷清晰，体积轻巧，适合随身携带，随时阅读。
Willa Cather’s 1913 novel, O Pioneers!is a story about the American West that really goes for the good stuff — the frontier way of life. It tells about the story of the Bergsons, a family of Swedish immigrants in the farm country near the fictional town of Hanover, Nebraska, at the turn of the 20th century. The book is number 83 on the American Library Association’s list of most frequently banned or challenged books.
Reviews: 
“To reread Cather is to rediscover an arresting chapter in the national past.” —Los AngelesTimes
“The time will come when she’ll be ranked above Hemingway.” —Leon Edel

女主人公亚历山德拉·伯格森是从瑞典来到美国的边疆拓荒者。父亲去世后，她担起了照顾全家人的责任。然而，在困顿的生活中，亚历山德拉还遭遇了各种不幸：三年大旱，庄稼歉收，经济危机，周围的人纷纷放弃土地向城市逃亡；家境有所好转时，两个大弟弟为争夺家产阻挠她结婚；她悉心培养的小弟弟大学毕业后又死于情杀……但她没有气馁，继续前行，凭借自己坚毅的信念，披荆斩棘，不仅征服了桀骜不驯的荒山野岭，还收获了爱情，走向生活的沃土。
The main character, Alexandra Bergson, inherits the family farmland when her father dies, and she devotes her life to making the farm a viable enterprise at a time when other immigrant families are giving up and leaving the prairie. The novel is also concerned with two romantic relationships, one between Alexandra and family friend Carl Linstrum and another between Alexandra’s brother Emil and the married Marie Shabata.

维拉·凯瑟（Willa Cather）是美国20世纪初一位杰出的女作家，在将近30年的写作生涯中，她著作丰富，共有13本中长篇小说和3本短篇小说集。她是美国20世纪一位伟大的小说家，其作品受到了美国人的喜爱。同时维拉也获得很多荣誉，如普利策奖、美国妇女奖等。出于对勃朗特、简·奥斯汀等女性作家的崇拜，维拉的作品体现了深远的女性主义含义。同时，因为自身早年迁徙的经历，维拉也十分擅长将荒原景色与心灵的呼唤结合，创作出动人的情节，以此引发人性的思考。
Willa Cather was an American author who achieved recognition for her novels of frontier life on the Great Plains, including O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia. In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, a novel set during World War I. Cather admired Henry James as a “mighty master of language and keen student of human actions and motives.” She generally preferred past literary masters to contemporary writers. Although Cather began her writing career as a journalist, she made a distinction between journalism, which she saw as being primarily informative, and literature, which she saw as an art form. Cather’s work is often marked by its nostalgic tone, her subject matter and themes drawn from memories of her early years on the American plains.

Introduction简介
PART I The wild Land荒原
PART II Neighboring Fields邻近的土地
PART III Winter Memories冬日回忆
PART IV The white Mulberry Tree白桑树
PART V Alexandra亚历山德拉
Afterword后记


CHAPTER 1
   One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away. A mist of fine snowflakes was curling and eddying about the cluster of low drab buildings huddled on the gray prairie, under a gray sky. The dwelling-houses were set about haphazard on the tough prairie sod; some of them looked as if they had been moved in overnight, and others as if they were straying off by themselves, headed straight for the open plain. None of them had any appearance of permanence, and the howling wind blew under them as well as over them. The main street was a deeply rutted road, now frozen hard, which ran from the squat red railway station and the grain “elevator” at the north end of the town to the lumber yard and the horse pond at the south end. On either side of this road straggled two uneven rows of wooden buildings; the general merchandise stores, the two banks, the drug store, the feed store, the saloon, the post-office. The board sidewalks were gray with trampled snow, but at two o’clock in the afternoon the shopkeepers, having come back from dinner, were keeping well behind their frosty windows. The children were all in school, and there was nobody abroad in the streets but a few rough-looking countrymen in coarse overcoats, with their long caps pulled down to their noses. Some of them had brought their wives to town, and now and then a red or a plaid shawl flashed out of one store into the shelter of another. At the hitch-bars along the street a few heavy work-horses, harnessed to farm wagons, shivered under their blankets. About the station everything was quiet, for there would not be another train in until night.
   On the sidewalk in front of one of the stores sat a little Swede boy, crying bitterly. He was about five years old. His black cloth coat was much too big for him and made him look like a little old man. His shrunken brown flannel dress had been washed many times and left a long stretch of stocking between the hem of his skirt and the tops of his clumsy, copper-toed shoes. His cap was pulled down over his ears; his nose and his chubby cheeks were chapped and red with cold. He cried quietly, and the few people who hurried by did not notice him. He was afraid to stop any one, afraid to go into the store and ask for help, so he sat wringing his long sleeves and looking up a telegraph pole beside him, whimpering, “My kitten, oh, my kitten! Her will fweeze!” At the top of the pole crouched a shivering gray kitten, mewing faintly and clinging desperately to the wood with her claws. The boy had been left at the store while his sister went to the doctor’s office, and in her absence a dog had chased his kitten up the pole. The little creature had never been so high before, and she was too frightened to move. Her master was sunk in despair. He was a little country boy, and this village was to him a very strange and perplexing place, where people wore fine clothes and had hard hearts. He always felt shy and awkward here, and wanted to hide behind things for fear some one might laugh at him. Just now, he was too unhappy to care who laughed. At last he seemed to see a ray of hope: his sister was coming, and he got up and ran toward her in his heavy shoes.