Immigrants in American Literature

Paper Summary:

This paper examines and compares three novels which deal with immigration to the promised land of America and movement through society and classes within the country itself. The paper shows how the characters in each novel deal with their new surroundings, language and mentality and compares the three novels. The works chosen to analyze are: "O, Pioneer" by Willa Cather which describes settlement in the American West, "Sister Carrie" by Theodore Dreiser which describes the rise from poverty and the fall from power and, finally, "Promised Land" an autobiography by Mary Antin, who immigrated to America at the age of 13 with her family.

From the Paper:

"It is assumed that the so-called great American urge to settle and farm western prairies was at its peak immediately following the Civil War. This was the time when Willa Cather's family moved to the east coast of Nebraska in 1873. She got her first sense of small-town life in Nebraska in 1884 when her family migrated to Red Cloud, another settlement, which she used as the setting for Hanover in "O Pioneer!." Her experiences and familiarity during her formative years in and among the settlers, her conversations with immigrant European farmers and the violent character of the prairie altogether created that huge impact that she translated into her novel. Ralph Waldo Emerson noted more than half a century later that such exceptional frontier experiences had to be recorded. It was Willa Cather who seized the essence of 19th century America and recorded her own experiences, first-hand, on the might of the land itself, the impersonal forces emitting from it, the hardships and tragedies in pioneer life much like a history in motion in her novel."

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