One of Ours (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

by Willa Cather

Overview

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

ISBN-13:	9780679737445
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/05/1991
Series:	Vintage Classics
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	94,715
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.92(h) x 0.84(d)
Lexile:	980L (what's this?)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

WILLA CATHER, author of twelve novels, including O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and Death Comes for the Archbishop, was born in Virginia in 1873 but grew up in Nebraska, where many of her novels are set. She died in 1947 in New York City.

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

"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