One of Ours

by Willa Cather Narrated by Kristen Underwood

Overview

Willa Cather's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel tells of the making of a young American soldier.

Claude Wheeler, the sensitive, aspiring protagonist, 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 the purpose he has been searching for all his life. His yearnings impel him toward a frontier wilder and more violent than the one tamed by his pioneer ancestors.

One of Ours is a canny and vital portrait of an American psyche at once skeptical and romantic, restless and heroic.

Editorial Reviews

Marina Warner

An astonishing power to touch an elegiac note right on the nerve without sentimentality.”

Guardian (London)

The thing about Willa Cather’s landscape and figures is that not only were they born alive but remain so after six decades.”

From the Publisher

"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

Product Details

BN ID:	2940192760666
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	01/01/2006
Edition description:	Unabridged

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