One of Ours

by Willa Cather

Overview

One of Ours is Willa Cather's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the making of an American soldier. Claude Wheeler, the sensitive but aspiring protagonist, has ready access to his family's fortune but refuses to settle for it. Alienated from his uncaring father and pious mother, and rejected by a wife whose only love is missionary work, Claude is an idealist without ideals to cling to. Only when his country enters the Great War does he find the meaning of his life. In One of Ours, Willa Cather explores the life of a young Nebraskan whose ambitions drive him to a frontier wilder and more violent than the one tamed by his pioneer ancestors. Newly designed and typeset in a modern 6-by-9-inch format by Waking Lion Press.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781434117328
Publisher:	Waking Lion Press
Publication date:	07/30/2008
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.81(d)
Age Range:	15 Years

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

Although there are WWI battle scenes in Willa Cather’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, the most important action is all in the mind of its main character. Claude Wheeler seeks a place in the world that is independent of the expectations of his family and the world of rural Nebraska. Narrator Joel Richards focuses on the interiority of the story without minimizing Claude’s complex and difficult connections with the world outside his head. The people around him come to life despite Claude’s difficulties in understanding his true relationships with them. (He may be on the autism spectrum.) Despite the character’s confusion and indecision, Richards remains interesting and sympathetic in portraying him. D.M.H. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

SEPTEMBER 2022 - AudioFile