Read the story carefully and answer the following questions. Analyzing O! Pioneers Willa Cather’s 1910 novel, O! Pioneers, follows a Swedish family of farmers in Nebraska. In this passage, John Bergson is dying and worries about what will become of his wife and young children. Alexandra is the oldest Bergson child. Alexandra, her father often said to himself, was like her grandfather; which was his way of saying that she was intelligent. John Bergson’s father had been a shipbuilder, a man of considerable force and of some fortune. Late in life he married a second time, a Stockholm woman of questionable character, much younger than he, who goaded him into every sort of extravagance. On the shipbuilder’s part, this marriage was an infatuation, the despairing folly of a powerful man who cannot bear to grow old. In a few years his unprincipled wife warped the probity of a lifetime. He speculated, lost his own fortune and funds entrusted to him by poor seafaring men, and died ...
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