Sixty years after her death Willa Cather is best remembered for her novel My Ántonia. Among scholars, Cather remains admired mostly for her novels A Lost Lady, The Professor’s House, and Death Comes for the Archbishop. However, in 1923 it was for a novel which many people have since forgotten that Cather received her only Pulitzer Prize.
One of Ours, like other of Cather’s novels and short stories, traces its inspiration to people and events true to the author’s life.
In 1920 Cather, a committed Francophile, travelled to France where she visited the grave of her first cousin, G. P. Cather, the first Nebraska Army Officer to die in World War I. After reading her deceased cousin's letters written home during the war, she decided to use the soldier's life as subject matter for her next novel.
One of Ours thus tells the story of a Nebraska farm boy who struggles to find meaning in his life. The protagonist Claude Wheeler eventually finds a purpose for living but only through fighting and dying in Europe during the First World War.
Before the war, Claude comes close to finding value in the world when his parents allow him to attend the University of Nebraska. Living in Lincoln he befriends the Ehrlich family, who expose him to a life of art, ideas, and culture. Later, when forced to return to his father’s farm, Claude seeks to find meaning in the form of human companionship. His attempt to find individual affirmation in the form of marriage fails, however, and the loneliness Claude encounters from his unaffectionate wife Enid compels him to volunteer in the overseas conflict.
Claude's violent death on the battlefield—portrayed as sacrificial and glorious by Cather in the mind of Claude’s mother—appealed to millions of Americans and probably played a role in the decision to award Cather the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours a year after it was published in 1922.
However, not everyone considered the novel an accurate depiction of the war. More than a few critics and writers condemned the novel as overly romantic or sentimental; they criticized Cather for writing about a war she had never seen. H. L. Mencken and Ernest Hemingway accused Cather of stealing battle scenes from the movies.
Yet One of Ours shares more in common with the Lost Generation’s novels of disillusionment than some realize. Cather’s war novel is a definitive work of American Modernism.
“The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts,” Cather famously remarked in the prefatory note to her collection of essays Not Under Forty. To her, there no longer seemed to be room in the world for exceptional persons like the ones she had written about earlier in novels like O Pioneers! and My Ántonia. The frontier period in American history was now over, and the admirable people who conquered the land and embodied traditional values seemed to be giving way to deceitful individuals and forces beyond human control. The rise in greed, materialism, and industrialization Cather saw taking place in the world seemed to overshadow the individual will.
Whether read as disheartening or encouraging, One of Ours deserves a more prominent place in the history of American literature.
Sources and Suggested Reading
Randall, John H. III. The Landscape and the Looking Glass: Willa Cather’s Search for Value. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960.
Skaggs, Merrill Maguire. After the World Broke in Two: The Later Novels of Willa Cather. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1990.
Trout, Steven, ed. History, Memory, and War. Cather Studies. Vol. 6. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2006.
Trout, Steven. Memorial Fictions: Willa Cather and the First World War. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2002.
