The novels O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My �ntonia made Willa Cather's reputation and, though published separately, are now studied together as Willa Cather’s Great Plains Trilogy. These three novels, set in Nebraska and Colorado, cemented Cather’s reputation in the early 1920s as a writer who exalted the lives of ordinary people. Together, these novels portray the magnificent prairie landscape and the indomitable spirit of the men and women who inhabited, and adapted, to its harsh beauty: My �​ntonia: The intertwined stories of Jim Burden, an orphan from Virginia, and the elder daughter in a family of Czech immigrants, �ntonia Shimerda, who are each brought to Nebraska as children. O Pioneers!: The Bergsons move from Sweden and struggle to carve out a living on their Nebraska homestead. The eldest daughter, Alexandra, inherits the farm when her father dies, and devotes her life to its success even as other immigrant families leave the prairie, defeated. The Song of the Lark: Thea Kronborg grows up in a small Colorado town, next to the railroad that connects her to a wider world, a world she will conquer with her glorious voice and strength of will.

In 1851 Father Jean Marie Latour comes to serve as the Apostolic Vicar to New Mexico. What he finds is a vast territory of red hills and tortuous arroyos, American by law but Mexican and Indian in custom and belief. In the almost forty years that follow, Latour spreads his faith in the only way he knows—gently, all the while contending with an unforgiving landscape, derelict and sometimes openly rebellious priests, and his own loneliness. Out of these events, Cather gives us an indelible vision of life unfolding in a place where time itself seems suspended.