O Pioneers!

Marie hid her face on his arm. "Don't ask me anything more. I don't know anything except how miserable I am." She clutched his sleeve and began to cry, "what am I to do if you don't go away? I can't go, and one of us must. Can't you see?"

Five-part prairie arc from Alexandra's land vision through neighboring-field prosperity to the White Mulberry Tree catastrophe and late union with Carl—plot as endurance tested by passion and loss rather than intrigue, so plot scores 87.

Carl did not say anything, but she felt his sympathy. He, too, was lonely. He was a thin, frail boy, with brooding dark eyes, very quiet in all his movements. There was a delicate pallor in his thin face, and his mouth was too sensitive for a boy's.

Alexandra the visionary farmer, Emil the beloved brother, Marie the trapped neighbor-wife, Carl the returning friend, and Frank Shabata the jealous husband—each figure a variant on prairie desire and constraint, so cast scores 90.

The wheat-cutting sometimes goes on all night as well as all day, and in good seasons there are scarcely men and horses enough to do the harvesting. The grain is so heavy that it bends toward the blade and cuts like velvet.

Part-based dilation from settlement struggle to harvest fullness to the compressed orchard tragedy; the final Part V resolves in elegiac quiet—tempo follows seasonal and emotional cycles, so pace scores 84.

The grain is so heavy that it bends toward the blade and cuts like velvet. There is something frank and joyous and young in the open face of the country. It gives itself ungrudgingly to the moods of the season, holding nothing back.

Cather's clean, luminous plain style—"cuts like velvet," "when friends marry, they are safe"—landscape and feeling rendered without ornament; among the finest American pastoral prose, so prose scores 93.

There is something frank and joyous and young in the open face of the country. It gives itself ungrudgingly to the moods of the season, holding nothing back. Like the plains of Lombardy, it seems to rise a little to meet the sun.

The Nebraska Divide, wheat fields, the orchard, and immigrant farms—the land as moral agent shaping Alexandra's vision and the lovers' doom; geography is destiny made visible, so world scores 94.

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.

Part I—the wild land, young Alexandra inheriting her father's burden—establishes the prairie as both promise and trap before the personal catastrophes arrive, so hook scores 86.

For the first time, perhaps, since that land emerged from the waters of geologic ages, a human face was set toward it with love and yearning. It seemed beautiful to her, rich and strong and glorious. Her eyes drank in the breadth of it, until her tears blinded her.

The pioneer woman as intellectual hero rather than helpmeet; the immigrant pastoral that refuses triumphal settlement narrative; Emil and Marie's adultery handled with classical fatalism on American soil, so innov scores 88.

"Does it seem to you like coming back to your own place? Do you feel at peace with the world here? I think we shall be very happy. I haven't any fears. I think when friends marry, they are safe. We don't suffer like—those young ones." She leaned heavily on his shoulder. "I am tired," she murmured. "I have been very lonely, Carl."

Alexandra leaning on Carl at the gate—friends marrying as safety after orchard murder—not triumph but earned companionship; loneliness acknowledged rather than erased, so ending scores 90.