Product Description

Willa Cather's Pulitzer Prize-winning narrative of the making of a young American soldier

Claude Wheeler, the sensitive, aspiring protagonist of this beautifully modulated novel, resembles the youngest son of a peculiarly American fairy tale. His fortune is ready-made for him, but he refuses to settle for it. Alienated from his crass father and pious mother, all but rejected by a wife who reserves her ardor for missionary work, and dissatisfied with farming, Claude is an idealist without an ideal to cling to. It is only when his country enters the First World War that Claude finds what he has been searching for all his life.

In One of Ours Willa Cather explores the destiny of a grandchild of the pioneers, a young Nebraskan whose yearnings impel him toward a frontier bloodier and more distant than the one that vanished before his birth. In doing so, she creates a canny and extraordinarily vital portrait of an American psyche at once skeptical and romantic, restless and heroic.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #333475 in Books
• Published on: 1991-11-05
• Released on: 1991-11-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Review
'An astonishing power to touch an elegiac note right on the nerve without sentimentality' MARINA WARNER 'The thing about Willa Cather's landscape and figures is that not only were they born alive but remain so after six decades' GUARDIAN

From the Inside Flap
Willa Cather's Pulitzer Prize-winning narrative of the making of a young American soldier

Claude Wheeler, the sensitive, aspiring protagonist of this beautifully modulated novel, resembles the youngest son of a peculiarly American fairy tale. His fortune is ready-made for him, but he refuses to settle for it. Alienated from his crass father and pious mother, all but rejected by a wife who reserves her ardor for missionary work, and dissatisfied with farming, Claude is an idealist without an ideal to cling to. It is only when his country enters the First World War that Claude finds what he has been searching for all his life.

In One of Ours Willa Cather explores the destiny of a grandchild of the pioneers, a young Nebraskan whose yearnings impel him toward a frontier bloodier and more distant than the one that vanished before his birth. In doing so, she creates a canny and extraordinarily vital portrait of an American psyche at once skeptical and romantic, restless and heroic.

About the Author
Willa Cather (1873-1947) was born in Virginia where for generations her ancestors farmed land. She became a teacher and journalist and is one of the greatest American writers of this century.

Customer Reviews

Cather's celebratory tribute to "one of ours"
For understandable reasons, "One of Ours" is perhaps Willa Cather's most underrated novel. Published in 1922, only four years after the end of the First World War, it is widely regarded as Cather's "war novel" and, although she visited Europe to research the battle scenes, she admitted the difficulty of writing such a novel when she had no direct personal experience of war itself. Judged simply as a war novel, then, it is certainly lacking in many respects; one won't find realist depictions of military action here. In addition, criticism that she glorified the war and its sacrifices has haunted the book since its publication.

But "One of Ours" is instead a eulogy for her cousin who served as an officer at the Western front. Only very small portions of the book actually occur during battle, and those that do are less about fighting than about a Nebraska boy who finds himself away from home, billeting with a French family and becoming friends with a fellow officer. Like some of her other works, "One of Ours" is a perceptive character sketch of a Midwestern youth struggling to escape the confinement of life on the farm.

The opening chapters follow Claude Wheeler from boyhood to an abortive college career, interrupted when his father insists that he leave school to work on the farm. One of the more absorbing sections describes his informal adoption by members of the Ehrlich family, who host a faux-bohemian parlor for their college-age friends and introduce Claude to Lincoln's social giddiness, intellectual intensity, and cultural pleasures: "He had never heard a family talk so much, or with anything like so much zest." After he returns home, his life begins a less satisfactory course, first by marrying an impossible woman and then by "escaping" to the war in Europe.

Readers and critics have often misunderstood Cather's novel; eighty years later, however, it's hard to see how anyone could say the novel prettifies combat. Instead, she probes, from Claude's perspective, those aspects of the war--camaraderie, adventure, patriotism--that entice young men to risk their lives. She explores the motives of those who serve their country while simultaneously lamenting the results. At the same time, she ridicules many of her usual targets--parochialism, bigotry, and righteousness--and lovingly portrays David Gerhardt, Claude's friend in Europe (who is based on a real-life violinist named David Hochstein). Taken as a whole, then, the novel is both Cather's celebratory tribute to "one of ours" and a grief-stricken remembrance of the tragic effects of war.

"I can not fiddle...
...,but I can make a great city of a small state". Themistocles once said these words that might have been lifted from the thoughts of Claude Wheeler, the central character in Cather's Pulitzer winning novel. Claude is out of place in rural Nebraska, the initial setting of the novel. Only on the battlefields of WWI does he finally come in to his own.

Having read the critical comments of others, I sympathize with some of thier views. Cather did perhaps overreach in this novel. And certainly other of her works deserve more attention (Song of the Lark, My Antonia, Oh Pioneers). But for those of us who would read the technical specs for the muffler of a 73' Pinto if Cather had written them, this book is pure pleasure. Frankly, I can't imagine any of her books deserving less than 5 stars.

I also take exception to comments regarding the weakness of the final chapters. I found Cather's musings on fighting for a cause incredibly stirring. They offered resolution to the soul searching and final triumph of Claude. The epic scope of this story transcends the mere trials of finding oneself and speak to what it means to be human. No mere "fiddling" indeed.

The Inevitable End
Though you begin to realize where this story is headed early in the novel, you are not quite prepared for where it takes you. It is heartbreaking, and Willa Cather does not beat you over the head with that. The story begins in Nebraska- this is where Cather exhibits her best writing in the story. Her description of our hero's lament is sincere in its vaguery. His feeling of entrapment spills over to the reader. Ms. Cather loses some of her magic when he goes off to The Great War. While we imagine that his sense of entrapment in Nebraska is lifted, we never really feel the emotional evolution that we expect he is going through. In addition, the first three quarters of the story contain a complicated familial element to which we never return.

In the end, where we knew we were headed, we long a little bit for the entrapment of our hero's Nebraska, but feel a little bit liberated by his new freedom.