One of Ours
by Willa Cather
Summary
Claude Wheeler is the middle son of a prosperous Nebraska farm family, and nothing in his life fits him. His father is genially contemptuous, his mother's piety comforts her and not him, his brothers are content in ways he cannot manage, and the college he loved is traded for the farm. He marries Enid Royce, who is more interested in prohibition work and missionary causes than in him, and when she sails to China to nurse her sister, Claude is left in a house that everyone but him can see was a mistake from the start.
Then America enters the war, and Claude enlists, and the novel splits in two. Cather writes the Nebraska half with everything she knew: the land, the seasons, the exact social temperature of a small town, the slow suffocation of a young man with no name for what he wants. The second half follows Claude to France as an officer, through the troopship influenza and into the trenches, where, for the first time, purpose and friendship and a larger world arrive together. He dies in action believing he has finally lived, and his mother, reading his letters afterwards, is left to weigh what that belief was worth.
Whether the book endorses Claude's transfiguration or quietly grieves over it is the live question, and Cather is subtler on it than her critics allowed.
Around four hundred pages.
Best for readers who love the Nebraska Cather and want to watch her take her one great risk, a war novel written against the grain of the disillusioned decade.
Historical Context & Significance
One of Ours won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1923 and widened Willa Cather's readership considerably; it arrived between My Ántonia and A Lost Lady, in the middle of her strongest decade.
Claude was drawn from her cousin Grosvenor P. Cather, killed at Cantigny in 1918; she said that from then on he was in her mind, and she interviewed veterans and walked the French battlefields to build his ending.
The reviews made it the most argued over Pulitzer of the decade. The war half was mauled by the very writers whose subject it touched: Hemingway sneered that the battle scenes came from the movies, Mencken said the second half sank to the level of a magazine serial, and Sinclair Lewis praised Nebraska and dismissed France. Against Three Soldiers and the coming disillusioned canon, a novel in which the war gives a man meaning read as heresy, which is exactly what makes it interesting now: it records what the war looked like from the farm kitchens, not the ambulances.