tells the story of the Bergsons, a family of Swedish-American immigrants in the farm country near the fictional[1] town of Hanover, Nebraska, at the turn of the 20th century.

On a windy January day in Hanover, Nebraska, Alexandra Bergson is with her five-year-old brother Emil, whose little kitten has climbed a telegraph pole and is afraid to come down.

For instance, he sleeps in a hammock, believes in killing no living thing and goes barefoot summer and winter.

After years of crop failure, many of the Bergson's neighbors are selling out, even if it means taking a loss.

After visiting villages downwards to see how they are getting on, Alexandra talks her brothers into mortgaging the farm to buy more land, in hopes of ending up as rich landowners.

Winter has settled down over the Divide again; the season in which Nature recuperates, in which she sinks to sleep between the fruitfulness of autumn and the passion of spring.

The rabbits run shivering from one frozen garden patch to another and are hard put to it to find frost-bitten cabbage stalks.

The variegated fields are all one color now; the pastures, the stubble, the roads, and the sky are the same leaden gray.

The ground is frozen so hard that it bruises the foot to walk on the roads or in the plowed fields.

One could easily believe that in that dead landscape the germs of life and fruitfulness were extinct forever.

Before leaving for Michigan, Emil stops by Marie's farm to say one last goodbye, and they fall into a passionate embrace beneath the white mulberry tree.

In a 1921 interview for Bookman, Willa Cather said, "I decided not to 'write' at all, – simply to give myself up to the pleasure of recapturing in memory people and places I'd forgotten.

They have done so by using different points of view or literary lenses that guide their understanding of the text and how they examine each of its parts.

specifically, Levy considers how Cather invokes the Nebraskan environment through the story of the main character Alexandra.

They state this is evident in not only her appearance but in other things like her lack of marriage status and her intelligence over men like her brothers.

[5] Another example includes Bruce Baker II’s “Nebraska Regionalism in Selected Works of Willa Cather”.

When Baker brings Alexandra into the discussion, her character is also analyzed according to how she relates to the land and has cultivated her family’s farm to be successful.

to discuss another work of Cather's, their closing remark involves commenting on the symbolism of the landscape of Nebraska and how its meaning can transcend to anyone and anything.

[6] Cather had moved to New York, and wrote the novel in part while living in Cherry Valley with Isabelle McClung.