One of Ours - Paperback

by Willa Cather (Author), Rebecca Onion (Introduction by)

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1923, One of Ours is the story of Claude Wheeler, the son of a Nebraska farmer. As a young man, Claude is dissatisfied with Nebraska farm like as well as his marriage to a childhood friend, desperate for a more cosmopolitan life. When America joins the Great War, Claude decides to enlist, where he finds excitement and fulfillment--as well as tragedy--on the battlefield.

One of Ours was considered a failure by some male critics of the day: H. L. Mencken said it drops to the level of a serial in the Ladies' Home Journal, fought out not in France, but on a Hollywood movie-lot, and Ernest Hemingway panned Cather for not having experienced the front-line herself.

However, the Pulitzer committee considered it the greatest novel of the year, and this accessible, dramatic novel sold many more copies than Cather's more famous ones, O, Pioneers! and My Antonia.

Author Biography

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.