One of Ours

Written by Willa Cather

Narrated by Kristen Underwood

Claude Wheeler, the sensitive, aspiring protagonist of this 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 this Pulitzer Prize-winning narrative, Cather creates a canny and extraordinarily vital portrait of an American psyche at once skeptical and romantic, restless and heroic.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Blackstone Audio
• Release date: Jan 1, 2006
• ISBN: 9780786113606

Willa Cather

Willa Cather (1873-1947) was an award-winning American author. As she wrote her numerous novels, Cather worked as both an editor and a high school English teacher. She gained recognition for her novels about American frontier life, particularly her Great Plains trilogy. Most of her works, including the Great Plains Trilogy, were dedicated to her suspected lover, Isabelle McClung, who Cather herself claimed to have been the biggest advocate of her work. Cather is both a Pulitzer Prize winner and has received a gold medal from the Institute of Arts and Letters for her fiction.

Reviews for One of Ours

[traumleben_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Cather's 1923 Pulitzer prize winning novel about Claude Wheeler, a Nebraska farm boy who never quite figures out what he wants to do with his life until he finally enlists in the Army to go fight in World War I. Where Hemingway provides a more stark account of life on and off the battlefield, Cather has a much more gentle and rolling prose that easily conveys the mystique of prairies as well as the wounded features of a war-torn France. Cather's characters are real, imperfect, and at times tortured by many of the selfsame questions that transcend generations: who am I, where do I belong, why am I here? Only the last third of the book really covers Claude's experience in Europe, but Cather does a superb job of capturing the experiences of young men going off to war, the waiting, the peril of a sea voyage, and the toils of combat. She must have read a great deal and spoken to a lot of veterans to have been able to retell it in her own way. One of my top five reads and an excellent supplement to a study in the Great War.

[janeajones · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a splendid novel, well deserving of the Pulitzer Prize it received in 1923.Claude Wheeler is a, idealistic, restless young farmer, pulled from a small religious college to be put in charge of his father's Nebraska farmlands. He feels he has no purpose in life, hemmed in by a narrow education and an American materialism that he finds meaningless. It is only when he enlists in the Army as the US is pulled into WWI that he feels he find a purpose and sense of the wider world. He is sent to France and as a lieutenant leads his men into the horrors of trench warfare. The novel has been criticized, most notably by Hemingway, as idealizing war, but I didn't see it that way at all. Certainly Cather is sympathetic to a young man's idealism that leads him to enlist to fight such a war, but her descriptions of the trenches and war-ravaged France leave no such impression.The prose is gorgeous, and her characterizations are subtle and multi-faceted, even of minor characters. At times I was reminded of DH Lawrence's layers in a novel such as [Women in Love].One of Ours, The Song of the Lark, and My Antonia are certainly Cather's best novels.When Ernest left, Claude walked as far as the Yoeder's place with him, and came back across the snow-drifted field, under the frosty brilliance of the winter stars. As he looked up at them, he felt more than ever that they must have something to do with the fate of nations, and with the incomprehensible things that were happening in the world. In the ordered universe there must be some mind that read the riddle of this one unhappy planet, that knew what was forming in the dark eclipse of this hour. A question hung in the air; over all this quiet land about him, over him, over his mother, even. He was afraid for his country, as he had been that night on the State House steps in Denver, when this war was undreamed of, hidden in the womb of time.

[mahallett · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I knew Claude was going to die when I was getting so close to the end and the war was still going on.

[dulcinea14-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Too old-fashioned for my tastes ultimately. Everyone is charmingly quaint and the storyline lacks any punch. The protagonist doesn't feel at home in his own hometown, so he joins the Navy where he finds some of what he is looking for. The novel criticizes technology and the innovations of society which followed the population of the American frontier. The protagonist looks to the past for comfort and finds what he desires in France. I think that a nation troubled by war is hardly the place of one's dreams and find the concept a bit condescending.

[countrylife_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I LOVED "My Antonia" with all-the-five-stars love! "One of Ours" just did not grab me in the same way.

[donna828 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Claude Wheeler was ill-suited as a Nebraska farm boy. His longings were realized after he entered a one-sided marriage and became obsessed with the news of WWI. When he decided he must enter the fray rather than live his life in shame because he did nothing to help innocent people, it was as if a different book was being written. The latter part of the book was about a hero rather than an angst riddled dreamer.When an idealist goes to war, something must change in him. Claude gladly gave up his malaise and assumed responsibility for the young men in his charge. He showed endurance under formidable conditions; he showed courage in the face of danger. I rather liked this change. I began thinking of him by his rightful name rather than "Clod" which I thought more descriptive in the beginning. Willa Cather received the Pulitzer Prize for this book in 1923. She was both praised and reviled for writing a war story. I think she did a fine job of exposing the stink and scourge of war as well as portraying the story of a young man who found his true calling as a soldier. This was another beautifully written book by a revered author.

[rainpebble_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

One of Ours by Willa Cather; (4 1/2*)This book is a beautifully written study of a sensitive, idealistic young man. But what elevates it to near masterpiece status is its extremely subtle depiction of the excesses of idealism. Trapped in a grubby, increasingly materialistic world, Claude yearns for something noble and meaningful. Unfortunately he finds it only in the patriotic fervor that swept America into The Great War, the most brutal, senseless war in history. Writing from Claude's viewpoint, Cather almost makes you think that the exhilaration of fighting for a noble cause does indeed justify the terrible toll of war, but not quite, because she occasionally drops tiny hints that Claude's newly found, heartfelt sense of purpose and engagement might be deluded and tragic. The final chapter told from his mother's viewpoint is devastating.The independent minded reader might keep comparing Claude's feeling about the glory of war with the fact that patriotic passion, fight and die for the homeland, has sent untold millions of soldiers to their death since nearly the dawn of time. Cather does little to help you maintain that all important perspective. I think she made it all too easy for conventional minded readers to take this story literally, as a tale of the glories of patriotism and sacrifice for home and country. It's never entirely clear whether and to what extent Cather sees through that horrendous myth. Perhaps that is the genius of the book; to force the reader to draw his own conclusions. Or perhaps as Hemingway always implied, Cather herself was seduced by the romantic, tragically blind view of the nobility of war. But I doubt that. I think that she was brilliant enough to leave us all wondering about that.The book is pure genius.

[lkernagh · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

One of Ours, winner of the 1923 Pulitzer Prize, is my third Willa Cather read, the first two being her more well-known stories Death Comes for the Archbishop and My Antonia. Cather’s prose is fabulous, as is her ability to bring to life her portrayal of Midwest Plains life. Her character development is exceptional, as is her vivid descriptions. Reading this one, it was like being exposed to a series of Impressionist agrarian paintings, where time (and technological advancements) move (are accepted) at a slower pace. I feel as though I intimately know both the land and the characters. The story focus is on Claude, an intelligent young man from a Nebraska farming family, who finds that his life does not have any purpose until he decides to enlist in the army to go and fight in the Great War. For Claude, this decision provides him with a way to fight for a higher purpose and contribute to the common good. Cather approach to war fiction (the second half of the story) is the same contemplative, introspective approach she takes when writing about hardscrabble Plains living. She does not sugar coat or exclude anything but she also does not dwell on graphic war details or focus on military strategy. Cather’s writing takes on a more holistic approach to the war, although the parts of the story set in France do not come across with the same graceful flow of the earlier sections of the story. Cather captures all of this through a slightly dreamy lens that may frustrate fans of war fiction like Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (apparently, Hemingway was a vocal critic of One of Ours when it was published).Overall, another wonderful story communicated through Cather’s simple, straightforward, descriptive prose.

[drfuriosa · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A sweeping story about coming-of-age, purpose, and the changes to a war-torn society.

[deltaqueen50 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

One of Ours by Willa Cather was originally published in 1922 and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1923. This is a book that tackles America’s place on the world stage before and during World War I and in a more intimate way, it is the story of a young American man who found his place of belonging upon the battlefields of France.Claude Wheeler was often dissatisfied with his life. He was the son of a wealth Nebraska farmer, and at the story’s opening is attending classes at a religious college, but he is unhappy with the level of teaching. When he comes home, however, he feels a misfit in the small prairie town. When circumstances put Claude out in the fields he is discontented and longs for a different life. A definite pattern emerges around Claude and when he woos and marries Enid, this pattern continues. Personally, I didn’t have a lot of sympathy for Claude as I felt he made no effort to make any changes in his life, he just seemed to drift.When his wife decides to go to China to nurse her ill missionary sister, he closes up his house and moves back home where is he generally fussed over by his mother and the family housekeeper. He becomes interested in current events and when America enters the war, Claude volunteers. As Lieutenant Wheeler, he matures into a much more likeable person, he becomes responsible and caring toward his men, interested in life and what is going on around him.While Willa Cather does impart a sense of romance into her war story, I understand that this book was written as a tribute to a cousin that died during the war. Overall I enjoyed this story and can attest to the fact that her books stand the test of time. However, for me, her writing strength still remains the picaresque and vivid descriptions she paints of the American landscape.

[timbazzett · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Loved a few other Cather books years ago, so jumped on this one at an AAUW used book sale several years back. It's languished on my shelf since then. Finally read it last week. Meh! It was a struggle to finish but I did. ONE OF OURS is a drab tale of Claude Wheeler, a sensitive, well-off Nebraska farm boy, (perhaps too well loved by his doting mother) who marries the wrong woman, endures a loveless marriage and an uninteresting life for a couple years. Then his wife goes off to China to care for her sick missionary sister, and Claude joins the Army to fight in the First World War in France, where he distinguishes himself, sees more of the world and makes a few good friends. The ending is sadly predictable and even a bit sappy in its sentimentality. While the writing was, I must admit, classic Cather, the story just did not work for me. Sorry, Willa. It was "just okay" for me, and I wouldn't recommend it. Try OH, PIONEERS or MY ANTONIA instead.- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER

[satyridae · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Goodness. This is a book that often feels plodding when one is reading, but in retrospect (even only an hour on) it's so clear and crystalline and lovely that one knows that it will stay with one forever. Claude is the quintessential flawed hero who makes bad choices and fails to understand himself until it is nearly too late. He is nestled in his setting of pre=WWI America like a filbert in a shell. The war brings him into his own but at a cost. This book is truly tragic but I'm better for having read it. I don't know if I can bear to read it again, but I'll always be glad that Darsa strong-armed me into it.

[leslie398 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

When I have had time to digest this novel a bit longer, I may bump it up to 5 stars... extremely moving. The first half of the story takes place in Nebraska & has all of Cather's trademark descriptive passages -- during this part of the book I thought it quite similar in feel to My Antonia. However, when Cather turns her extraordinary imagery to Claude's life as a WWI soldier, first on a flu-ridden troop transport and then at the front & in the trenches, it is heart-breaking.

[mikedraper · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Set in Nebraska in the time just before WWI, Claude Wheeler is a Nebraska farm boy.As the story opens, he is living at the family farm and ready to leave for college. He is attending a college his parents picked for him. A preacher, "Brother Wheeler" came to the farm and told his parents about this school and how it would strengthen a person's faith. Calude was sent there and would live with the Weldons. His rental payments would help the Weldon's financial position.Claude didn't like the school or Weldon. He also didn't care for Weldon's clinging sister. He wanted to go to the State University. When he finally persuaded his parents to send him there, his views of worldly matters widened.He also met Julius Erlich and became friends with that family. They were a happy family and spoke of more meaningful things while enjoying life. Mrs. Erlich became fond of Claude and invited him to many family gatherings.Whent he war breaks out, the people around Claude didn't know much about European history or worldly matters. Claude's father's immediate reaction was that it would be good for the farmers because they could increase the price of wheat.When the German army invaded Louxembourg, Claude didn't know if that was a country or a city. He, like many people in the area, had to search for maps to see where this war was taking place.The story is told in narrative form. The theme seems to be that Claude, like middle America, has a naiveness about world matters, prior to their entry into the war.The story details how much a persons faith had on thier lives and we follow Claude's growth from the shy farm boy to a lieutenant, helping many of his men as they became sick on the voyage to Europe.An entertaining and informative read.

[lauralkeet · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is the story of Claude Wheeler, a young man who grew up on a Nebraska farm in the early 1900s. Claude is pursuing a university education at a religious college chosen by his parents, but is both unhappy with his education and uncertain about his goals. While he longs for the finer things in life that come from an advanced degree, he also has a strong sense of family loyalty and will interrupt his studies to assist with farm work when necessary. When Claude's father buys a large parcel of land from another farmer, he also decides Claude will return home and assume responsibility for the original family farm. Claude sets aside his higher ambitions and throws himself into farming. He gets married and appears set to spend the rest of his days on the farm, until World War I breaks out and Claude decides to join the American forces in France. My copy of this book came from my local library and, unfortunately, the book jacket included huge spoilers in its first two sentences. This threatened to ruin the book for me, but I tried to make lemonade from these lemons. Since I already knew about some pivotal events in Claude's life, I read with a view toward understanding why this book won the 1923 Pulitzer Prize. Typical of Cather's work, One of Ours is filled with vivid images of the American prairie, and the first- and second-generation immigrants who worked the land. Frankfort is a conservative community; its people are steeped in their faith and rather isolated from the broader world. As the threat of war loomed large, Claude's "mother had gone up to 'Mahailey’s library,' the attic, to hunt for a map of Europe,—a thing for which Nebraska farmers had never had much need. But that night, on many prairie homesteads, the women, American and foreign-born, were hunting for a map." Cather also shows the dark side of the community when certain members of German descent are charged with "disloyalty" and subject to a hearing in court. Cather's portrayal of wartime France is also very much focused on people, much more than the fighting. It's an interesting angle. Since One of Ours was published just a few short years after the end of World War I, it was received at a time when emotions were still quite raw. Cather's writing is, as always, superb. And her portrayal of an innocent farm boy who serves in battle would have struck a chord for just about anyone. Unfortunately once I knew how things would turn out there were sections that seemed to drag on endlessly. I probably would have given this book a higher rating had there not been spoilers ... frustrating!

[briantomlin · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Another novel that shows the "American Story" of the early Twentieth Century, One of Ours is one of the most disturbing war account novels I have read. The American Dream collides with the horrors of modern warfare with beautiful flashes of poetic insight, tales and descriptions of death, suffering, innocence lost. It is the structure that really makes this a powerful novel-- it begins and continues for well over the first half as not a war novel, but in the way that popular novels of the time begin, with the trials and petty tribulations of a young boy growing up in a farming community. He is a dreamer, a thinker. His world view is so limited that he doesn't know the source of his discontentment. He goes on with his life, and the pain I felt as a reader when he had to give up his schooling to help his family farm business. He takes a path familair to many -- marriage leading into a slowing building sense of hopelessness, that his life would just continue on autpilot. So the main character is a man with a sense of the greater held back by his mediocre situation.The war comes into the book suddenly, and by joining it Claude is able to see the world and meet other people he can relate to. This is the most beautiful and insightful part of the novel, because Claude is able to have the insights about what is possible and beautiful in the world. It took war for him to feel alive.His death, not unexpected, is cathartic because so much pain, anxiety, loss, destruction is described. The hero is dead; the anxious suspense is over. The narrator and Claude's mother echo the sense that perhaps he was better off dying while he still had his ideals of nations and beauty, for the ones who survived met with horrible disillusionment, depression, and many killed themselves. Virginia Woolf deals with the same theme in two of her novels, Jacob's Room and Mrs. Dalloway.Somewher in the book is a line that maybe these men had to die and all of this destruction had to happen to awaken America and the world to new ideas. An interesting commentary given all the history and warfare that have followed WWI,what was supposed to be "the war to end all wars." The only thing ended seems to be the belief that war could be ended, at least that violence could end violence. The 60s flower children /hippie movement felt that happy thoughts and well-meaning people focusing on peace could do it, but many of them became just as dillusioned as the characters in this novel, who were trying to achieve the same goal with weapons.

[curls_99 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Willa Cather's One of Ours takes us again to the Midwest. It is the story of Claude Wheeler, the son of a wealthy farmer in Nebraska who seeks desperately to find his place in the world. He attempts to go off to school, an undertaking that his family sees as a temporary distraction while Claude is waiting to take over the family farm but what he sees as an opportunity to escape to a more meaningful life. He does come back to the farm when he is needed and attempts to settle down, builds a house, and marries a girl because that is what he is expected to do. All the while, his soul longs to be free to find new things. When Claude's wife goes to China to take care of her invalid missionary sister, he sees his opportunity to break free by joining the army and heading into World War I.Warning: spoilers in this paragraph.Claude truly finds the freedom and happiness he was seeking in his new experiences - ironic because he had entered a violently bloody war and saw things that would torment others for years to come. In the end, Claude dies, rather suddenly, in a battle.I found this book a very interesting read - not only for the content, but for the style of writing. Instead of giving the story from the perspective of one character or no character, Cather seamlessly shifts from one character's point of view to another - sometimes from one paragraph to the next. One feels as though they are floating from character to character instead of remaining fixed behind the eyes of one person or remaining permanently outside of all character. The shift doesn't happen frequently, but just enough to give a complete picture of the story.Spoiler again:Something that struck me in the book that I had never considered was the fact that after Claude died and his family had received the news his mother still received letters from him for several weeks because of the time it took for soldiers' letters to reach home from the front. I can't even imagine being a family member and experiencing that..I know this is a long post, but this book really made me think about all kinds of different things. That doesn't always happen, so I thought I should write it out when I could.

[vesnaslav · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

A weaker All Quiet on the Western Front or The Red Badge of Courage, but still a sympathetic read of a particular story from WWI.

[joycepa_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

1923 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.I’ve lived in Nebraska and know well the rolling landscape, the hard-working but easy-going people who farm and ranch the land there. Willa Cather’s prose, as far as I’m concerned, reflects perfectly their characters. That is the first impression that a reader takes away from One of Ours. And its protagonist, Claude Wheeler, reminds me of young people I’ve met there, who love their state and their families, but somehow don’t quite fit in. While Cather was writing about the turn of the 20th century, the story could indeed have taken place over 50 years later.Claude’s pragmatic father doesn’t see the necessity, for a farmer, of too much education. Thus, Claude has to forego completing his college degree, and forsaking he friends, much different from those at home, he’s made in Lincoln. His mother, a more or less fundamentalist Christian (although the movement itself within Christianity hadn’t yet begun), is quite sensitive to Claude’s moods and aspirations; her emotional pain on behalf of her son is almost physical. Claude, as would be expected of a young man his age, marries—only to have his wife go to China to help her sister. His emotional desolation is nearly complete; he wonders if that’s all there is to life—getting up in the morning, working, going to bed at night. It may satisfy friends his age who ask nothing better than to farm their own land, but Claude longs for something more—what, he’s not sure but something.Then World War I erupts in Europe. Claude and his mother follow the war through the newspapers and maps they pore over together. When the United States enters the war, Claude enlists—and finds his place in the world.Cather describes the effect of the war on France and its people. She also writes about little-known facts, such as the toll sickness took of the soldiers on the way over, many dying from pneumonia. She has interesting details about what it was like for the soldiers to live under wartime conditions—bathing in polluted water in shell holes was a nice touch. There is some description—not much—of the fighting but it fits in with her story. Clearly she was more interested in what happened to the people, both French and the Allied soldiers, than she was in the details of the fighting itself.The last pages are heart-rendering; the impact is enormous. I think you have to be a stone to be unmoved.For a relatively short book—371 pages in my edition, One of Ours is beautifully evocative of a time, a place, and a young man’s successful search for himself. One of the best of the early Pulitzer winners.

[ithilwyn · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This one is my favorite Willa Cather novel. A real departure for her, she took a lot of criticism for writing about war when she had never seen it herself. Amazing how men seem to think they can write female characters without experience, but Cather for some reason cannot write a male character. Hmmm. Anyway, a very well drawn character and a very moving plot.

[aliciamalia · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

One of Ours is a Pulitzer Prize winner; unfortunately it's not Cather's best work. There's nothing really wrong with it - I enjoyed seeing WWII through the eyes of someone writing immediately following it - but it's slightly flat and slow moving.