One of Ours

by Willa Cather

Overview

One of Ours by Willa Cather (1922) follows Claude Wheeler, a young man from rural Nebraska who feels restless and unfulfilled by farm life and a stifling marriage. Longing for purpose and meaning, Claude enlists when the United States enters World War I. In France, he finally experiences a sense of belonging and noble purpose amid the camaraderie and sacrifices of war. The novel explores themes of disillusionment, idealism, and the search for identity, contrasting the monotony of home with the intensity and tragedy of war.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798897186617
Publisher:	Lushena Books
Publication date:	08/26/2025
Pages:	346
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.06(d)

About the Author

Willa Cather was an American writer who is most famous for her novels of frontier life on the Great Plains, including O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia.

Rebecca Onion is a staff writer for Slate. Her work has appeared in Aeon Magazine, the Boston Globe’s Ideas section, the Virginia Quarterly Review, The Atlantic, Topic Magazine, the Austin-American Statesman, and others. She lives in Athens, Ohio.

Date of Birth:

December 7, 1873

Date of Death:

April 27, 1947

Place of Birth:

Winchester, Virginia

Place of Death:

New York, New York

Education:

B.A., University of Nebraska, 1895

Table of Contents

Preface     vii
One of Ours     3
Acknowledgments     607
Historical Apparatus: Historical Essay     613
Explanatory Notes     677
Textual Apparatus: Textual Essay     801
Emendations     833
Notes on Emendations     843
Table of Rejected Substantives     849
World Division     859

Editorial Reviews

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 (London)

"Life was so short that it meant nothing at all unless it were continually reinforced by something that endured; unless the shadows of individual existence came and went against a background that held together."

"Women ought to be religious; faith was the natural fragrance of their minds. The more incredible the things they believed, the more lovely was the act of belief. To him the story of "Paradise Lost" was as mythical as the "Odyssey"; yet when his mother read it aloud to him, it was not only beautiful but true. A woman who didn't have holy thoughts about mysterious things far away would be prosaic and commonplace, like a man."

"Every morning the sun came up a red ball, quickly drank the dew, and started a quivering excitement in all living things."

"The sun was like a great visiting presence that stimulated and took it's due from all animal energy. When it flung wide it's cloak and stepped down over the edge of the fields at evening, it left behind it a spent and exhausted world."

― Willa Cather, One of Ours

From the Publisher