Your fascination with all aspects of pioneering makes your first choice particularly apt. O Pioneers! is a novel by Willa Cather, set in Nebraska.

Nebraska is the quintessential Great Plains state. If you drive across America, or go by train, you hurry through it as fast as you can and think it is no more than grass lands and corn fields. You think there is very little else except for one big city on the eastern side, Omaha – where, incidentally, America’s richest man, Warren Buffett, lives. Two great rivers dominate the state, the North Platte and the Missouri.

I have become fascinated with the internals, as it were, of Nebraska. I love the fact that the great migratory routes – the Oregon trail and the Mormon migrations – all passed through it. There is an enormous sandstone pinnacle in the far west of Nebraska called Chimney Rock, a landmark which you can see from 30 miles. It remains unchanged from the times it was a real landmark, over 100 years ago.

To me, Nebraska is a fantastically interesting crossroads, and a place where the east-west journeying of America is at its apex. You see the quintessence of pioneering in Nebraska. Willa Cather, who was born there but spent most of her writing life in New York City, felt a keen sense of nostalgia for the very hardscrabble life in the early pioneering days in Nebraska, and has written several books. I think she is one of the greatest of all American women writers.

It is difficult to choose a favourite book of hers, but if I had to choose it would be O Pioneers! It’s an extraordinary story of a Swedish family who stepped over the frontier that I was talking about into this raw, untouched and very harsh land. There was no habitation, no cities, roads or anything. You had to start from scratch. They would build sod houses, begin to grow things, raise animals and see whether they could survive through a hard winter. And then they met other people and there was a market, and then came children.

And slowly they become a community.

Yes. It is quite extraordinary to see the formation of an American community. You find out about the lives and loves that define that community, and ultimately the crime. There is a famous murder under a mulberry tree.

How did the lives of those early pioneers shape America’s social history?

Tremendously so. Of course, it answers to a degree the deep and sincerely felt godliness of Americans. God was all they had to trust, because all the elements of nature worked against them so all they could do was pray and hope for the best. Most of them ultimately survived, got through and succeeded. So a toughness, determination, ambition and underlying godliness very much marks the Midwestern life in America, even to this day.

Next up is the classic novel Stoner, by John Williams, which explores the repercussions of trying to better yourself through education.

This book begins in a similar way to O Pioneers!, with a hardscrabble farm in the same part of the world. It was set at the end of the 19th century and has nothing to do with being stoned. A lot of people think, “This is a novel about drugs.” It is not at all! It is about a young man, William Stoner, who goes off to university at great financial cost and deprivation to his father, who is a pioneer farmer. The boy goes off to agricultural college and this is seen as a great triumph. But while he is there he encounters literature for the first time, specifically a Shakespearian sonnet, and is transformed by reading it. He decides he doesn’t want to study agriculture at all, and we see him become a professor of literature.

It is tempting to think that this is an academic novel with all its trials and tribulations, but it is not that either. It is a much more tender thing. It is a novel based essentially on disappointment, because Stoner has a rotten marriage and a terrible time academically. But he carries on and develops an intense affection for his now much more modest life. It is a story of intellectual determination and the ability of a man to find love simply in what he does. It is a book about love of learning.

I don’t want to give it all away, but he does find true love with a woman towards the end of his life, so in the end there is great blessing and happiness. To me, Stoner is almost the perfect novel. It is very little known but anyone who reads it is completely captivated by it. It is a wonderful, wonderful book.

His first marriage is a move upwards socially, but as you say he isn’t happy in it. People often think that there is more social mobility in the US than in the UK. As someone who has lived in both places, do you think that is the case?

I do, to be perfectly honest. There are novels which show some ossification of social stratification in America, and in cities like Boston it is rampant. But generally I would say that there is a lot more social mobility in this country than in Britain. It is one of the reasons why I find there is a much greater degree of opportunity for someone like me than back in my home country of the UK. I have become a citizen of the United States, and while I am in no way disdainful of Britain and enormously affectionate of it, I am pleased that I am an American.