Cather's move to Nebraska as a child, the people she met there, and the seemingly endless prairie around her captured her imagination and became the inspiration for her novel "O Pioneers!" In this work, Cather introduces her readers to the diversity of immigrants who settled in the area around her home in Red Cloud, Nebraska. Cather's novel represents the age-old appeal of the West--hope, optimism, mystery--as well as the Janus-face dilemma of acculturation: the longing to partake in all that the new land has to offer and the reluctance to give up a rich and comforting cultural heritage. While this novel is often read as an example of America's welcoming acceptance of immigrants, "O Pioneers!" opens a door into exploring nativist attitudes toward the influx of immigrants into the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.