"Ruin and new birth; the shudder of ugly things in the past, the trembling image of beautiful ones on the horizon; finding and losing; that was life, he saw." A mother's love for a distressed son. A son's love for his emotionally-abused and pious mother. A young man pondering life and what it has to offer. A war that has to be fought. A protagonist who feels the pull of duty to a war that summons American lives. If this is not a book about the inner turmoils of war and one's psychological ba

Published in 1922, One of Ours by Willa Cather won the 1923 Putlizer Prize for the Novel. It carried Cather’s fine prose, especially when the object was the Nebraska landscape and life on the prairie. However, this story dominated by the atrocities of World War 1 and its significance to the protagonist’s sense of purpose was not palatable reading and I was not convinced by its line of thought or indeed the suggestion that a dull life can be saved by war.Claude Wheeler is a farmer’s son who wishe...

At one point, an army officer thinks about scolding his soldiers for mixing with French women who had been living in a territory just freed from Germans but decides not to because it would be like scolding birds. You could basically say the same about reviewing Cather. There is no defining why exactly I love her writing so much. You could say she writes about Prairies or rural life so beautifully and you could say, about this particular book, that she created a magnification character in Claude

Willa Cather has been one of my favorite authors since I was a kid. I'm a Nebraskan, it's a law that we love Willa. I picked this one up at the library without knowing much about and was quite pleased with what I found. "One of Ours" is the story of Claude Wheeler, a small town boy at the turn of the century. The first half of the book moves at a deliberate pace and shows how Claude became the man he would ultimately be. The second half is all about Claude's time fighting in WWI. Cather does a f...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1923. Claude Wheeler is a young man with, seemingly, everything. Well respected parents who own a good Nebraska farm that will someday belong to Claude, and he has a new wife. But Claude has bigger dreams that can't be fulfilled in this setting. His parent's are indifferent to his dreams, and his wife is only interested in her church and mission work. Then World War I comes along, and Claude sees this as his opportunity to do something meaningful with

I'm crying as I write this review??? And it was a book for class????This book is set during World War I, but the first half of this book talks about the main character's life at home and how he feels discontent with working on the farm and discontent with the marriage he fell into and discontent with living a life that was meaningless. I thought his inner struggle was so compelling and even somewhat relatable, and I adored his personality as well.The latter half of this book is when he is deploy...

3.5 stars, rounded up.The first half of this novel is Willa Cather in her element. She knows the plains and its people, and as long as Claude was on the farm and in his small town, I found each word true and compelling. The second half of the novel, which takes place in France during WWI, does not ring as true and loses its grip on the characters somewhat. The horrors of the trenches of WWI are well-known and any idea that a man could feel happy to be there seems far-fetched. Happy to go, yes, h...

One of Ours is another in a long line of beautiful works by Willa Cather, and the one she won a Pulitzer for. If you’re a Cather fan already, well, you’re used to her stories generally going not much of any place in particular. If you’re new to her work, prepare for a languorous, yet profound, journey through the lives of remarkably ordinary people. One of Ours hews to her style of magnificently in-depth characterizations and elegiac descriptions of the early twentieth century American West.This...

Without realizing it I have quite a few WWI books coming up on my TBR list. Usually I space out historical novels but I think I'll read these as a group. This is the first. I got this for free on Amazon for kindle about a year ago. This won the Pulitzer in 1923, although it's not listed on the 1001 books to read before you die list. As with Cather's other books, this starts out on a farm in Nebraska (and the farm life continues for 75% of it). Claude doesn't fit in and has those "what's it all a...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, this is the story of Claude Wheeler, an American farm boy who grows to manhood convinced that there is something more “splendid about life” than the quotidian existence he sees around him, that will be his future. Frustrated at his inability to attend anything but a small religious college, and entranced by glimpses of a more daring family who engage in intellectual debate and love the arts, he gets married but finds that his wife, too, lives only for Christian miss...

This novel is fascinating for many reasons. Published in 1922, Willa Cather won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 – and it was well-deserved.One of the fascinations for me is that people are people are people. Although there was a gentler and more polite tone within and between people, they still had the same thoughts and feelings and wonderings as people in our current times.Willa Cather’s writing has a way of discovering the inner depths of people and through their thoughts and impressions, we feel t...

Leave it to Willa Cather to write the most peaceful book about war I have ever read. One of Ours is not my favorite story about World War I or my favorite Cather, but it is truly beautiful. Cather's description of the destruction caused by war and America's participation in global economy is fascinating, and I was surprised to find a perspective that I think of as common in post-Vietnam writing in a book published before the Great Depression.One of the characteristics I love most about Cather as...

One of our Ours seems to be perceived as just another World War I novel but the truth is that the war is one of many settings in this novel that are used by Cather to tell a humanistic story. The book brings to life the beliefs of humans, the realities formed out of these beliefs, and their consequences. Specifically, she focuses on the people of small towns in rural America and one young adult who is in search of who he should become while living in a sea of strong-minded family and friends. Wh...

The story of Claude Wheeler, a college-age farmer's son in Nebraska, just before and during World War I. I try to put my finger on what is so appealing about Cather's prose, besides the sensitive and subtle presentation of her characters and her vivid descriptions of the physical world. I guess it's her non-judgmental choice of words--she presents some pretty repellent characters, but she never describes them in a way to prejudice the reader; she lets other characters be repelled by them. What s...

A moving novel about human restlessness and search for purpose. Claude Wheeler is born into a prosperous farming family in Nebraska at the turn of the century. Finding dissatisfaction in work and marriage, Claude finally finds purpose while serving in France during WWI. A well-drawn character portrait and portrait of the time.

“He is convinced that the people who might mean something to him will always misjudge him and pass him by. He is not so much afraid of loneliness as he is of accepting cheap substitutes; of making excuses to himself for a teacher who flatters him, of waking up some morning to find himself admiring a girl merely because she is accessible. He has a dread of easy compromises, and he is terribly afraid of being fooled.”This is a quote taken from the story. It describes the central protagonist—Claude...

3,5 starsThis won Cather the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. It has been dubbed her war novel and was heavily criticised by Sinclair, Hemingway and Menken to name a few. Of course that at least convinced me to give it a chance! It starts in Nebraska and ends in France, following the life and adventures of Claude Wheeler. The novel has a broad sweep. There is something of a follow on from the Pioneer novels. Claude is the son of a pioneer and there is a sense of the ending of an era. Claude feels other p...

The 1923 Pulitzer doesn't exactly stand out from Cather's other works, but there are some things she does more intensely here than anywhere else. She slows the story down, relying more on her storytelling mastery, and she brings in critical research and eye-witness interviews. This is a World War I book, and Cather is quoted as hating that classification. But it's here she takes us to France, into the trenches and so on. Inspired by a close neighbor who was a casualty of war, Cather, the one tim...

Who's the GREAT American writer ? Not Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Wharton, Faulkner. Here she is : Willa Cather.

The Nebraska half of the novel is good. I just couldn't get behind what Cather had to say about the experience of war once Claude goes to France. I have no doubt that many, many wonderful people find a home and a meaningful life in the military. I just struggle with the message that World War I trench combat made anyone's life whole. I've never been a soldier and I've never been in a war, but I've read the stories of many talented writers who've lived that experience and this story didn't ring t...