From the Bookshelf of Tackling the Pulitzer Prize Winners!…

One of Ours

Willa Cather

Start date: January 1, 2024

Finish date: January 31, 2024

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Why we're reading this: 1923 winner
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By Leslie · 1 post · 112 views

last updated Jul 02, 2011 06:15AM

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Dec 18, 2015 Bookslut rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: pulitzer

I don't like the way Willa Cather writes--it is such pared-down, understated prose that it doesn't sit easily on my brain. Nonetheless, this book really touched me. My critique is that the two parts of the novel do not relate well to each other. The first part is an in-depth character study, almost painfully slow, and the second is a fast, plot-heavy war story. The character study she's set up so carefully is almost lost, rather than developed, in the war portion. It's kind of a shame, since the ...more

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Jul 25, 2014 Jimmy rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: pulitzers-read

Willa Cather's Pulitzer winning novel about a young farmer boy from the heartland of the U.S. and his going off to fight in The Great War is, as usual for Cather, beautifully written. Cather has a lovely easy and measured style that is on full display in this story. The positive of this style is its lyricism. Reading Cather is like watching a slow motion, panoramic film shot of a beautiful sunset on lush corn fields in the Great Plains that is remarkable and breathtaking in its aesthetic, but do Willa Cather's Pulitzer winning novel about a young farmer boy from the heartland of the U.S. and his going off to fight in The Great War is, as usual for Cather, beautifully written. Cather has a lovely easy and measured style that is on full display in this story. The positive of this style is its lyricism. Reading Cather is like watching a slow motion, panoramic film shot of a beautiful sunset on lush corn fields in the Great Plains that is remarkable and breathtaking in its aesthetic, but doesn't say much more in the way of narrative beyond this slow-moving scenic aesthetic. Think of a sweeping, non-verbal nature scene in the movie "A River Runs Through It" or "Dances With Wolves" and you can begin to get a sense of what it is like to read a Cather novel. The negative side (at least to me) is that it's deliberately slow-paced and can be tedious. This particular novel is not Cather's best work, but it's a fair representation of her talent as a writer.

That said, this particular story, for all its beauty, is not very well put together as a story. To me it seemed more like a collection of loosely related short stories than a coherent novel. The protagonist, Claude Wheeler, is the glue that keeps the stories together in the sense that they are all about moments in his life, but the connections between these moments to make a coherent whole just aren't really there. Claude's college life, his failed marriage, his transport overseas to the battlefield, and his actual experiences on the battlefield are all intriguing glimpses into Claude's person, but they just don't hold together well. One wonders what ever became of the Ehrlich family? Or what ever happened to Enid or Gladys? Or what was the significance of such a detailed description of the epidemic sickboat journey from the U.S. to France? And the last chapter, a patriotic poetic tribute to WWI veterans, as touching as it is, was just completely out of place in the storytelling style of the rest of the novel.

Yes, I enjoyed the book; and I would recommend it as a good contemporary reflection on the character of the US and its youth who fought in WWI during this period in U.S. history. I think it won the Pulitzer, though, not on the basis of its being great literature (because it's not, and it's not even close to Cather's best), but because it's a bit of a WWI hagiography published at a time when people were looking to celebrate its idealistic WWI young soldiers in a post-WWI moment of grief and reckoning at the losses of this war. ...more

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Jul 14, 2013 Richard rated it really liked it

Shelves: pulitzer-fiction

I have a much higher opinion of Willa Cather after reading One of Ours, given the only book of hers I had previously read was O Pioneers. While not a native of the Midwest, Cather effortlessly writes about the farming families of the Nebraska Prairie, many of whom were European immigrants settling in the heartland barely within a generation of arriving on America’s shores. The main character in One of Ours, Claude Wheeler, is also from a family who settled a farmstead just a generation ago, thou I have a much higher opinion of Willa Cather after reading One of Ours, given the only book of hers I had previously read was O Pioneers. While not a native of the Midwest, Cather effortlessly writes about the farming families of the Nebraska Prairie, many of whom were European immigrants settling in the heartland barely within a generation of arriving on America’s shores. The main character in One of Ours, Claude Wheeler, is also from a family who settled a farmstead just a generation ago, though emigrating from the culturally foreign land of New England instead of from across the ocean. While the family farm prospers, a sense of passion and life purpose eludes Claude. His disillusionment is progressively nurtured through a series of setbacks and disappointments that might have rolled off the back of a different man, but as his mother painfully observes, particularly affects Claude because of his yearning for something greater beyond the familiarity and prosperity of the farm.

For me, Cather succeeds in One of Ours where she failed in Pioneers: providing a main character in which I became invested, and a somewhat unlikely one at that. While the separate events and elements of Claude’s story are not that outstanding in themselves, Cather manages to shape them in a way that wins empathy for Claude. In the hands of a less skilled author, Claude might simply be dismissed as an ungrounded young man who over-indulges feelings of being disconnected and misunderstood. Instead, I willingly followed Claude on his quest of self-discovery, as he leaves the comfortable setting of the Nebraska prairie and enlists in the Army, surviving a journey on a disease-ridden boat that would take him to the shores of Europe and into the heart of the conflict we now know as WWI.

This brings me to a major criticism this work: One of Ours is very nearly 2 separate books cohabitating under the spine of single book title, tenuously linked by the character of Claude Wheeler. Yes, the Claude Wheeler in the 2nd half is still trying to find his ultimate existential purpose while commanding a company of soldiers as a lieutenant in the US Army, but he seems to have developed amnesia for anything and anyone having to do with his life back in Nebraska. At the end of the book, when Cather eventually circles back to the Nebraska farmstead, she also develops amnesia for nearly all of the characters that were first introduced to help in the shaping of Claude's character, save two -- Claude’s mother, and Mahailey, the old housekeeper the family took in years ago. Perhaps Cather is subtly suggesting these were the only two, in the end, that every really mattered to Claude, and uniquely understood his restlessness and striving for a place in the world beyond the farm. A less charitable view is that the wrap-up has a rushed feel, and my inner cynic tempts me to speculate that a reluctant Cather was instructed by her editor to make at least a passing nod to some of the characters she may have thought she was done writing about after completing the first half.

One of Ours won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923, and is another data point that strengthens my belief that the Pulitzer winners as a collection contain an American history lesson unlike any other, a lesson that goes beyond any classroom. Cather writes of a period in which the country is mostly settled, day to day survival is mostly assured, and America’s growing prosperity and influence of the early 20th century is increasingly being projected overseas. Even in this tale about a Nebraska farm boy's journey of self-discovery, there is an underlying sense that America is a confident and self-assured nation, equal to the task of confronting a rising tyranny in the Old World. One of Ours was written, of course, well before the sobering periods of the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl (which would decimate many of the prairie farms), and the much larger conflict that takes place in basically the same arena as the one where Claude Wheeler briefly and gloriously finds his true purpose. We know all this of course, from our basic textbook lessons in American history. But we know so much more of the story beyond the textbooks because of Pulitzer winners like The Grapes of Wrath, Dragon's Teeth, and Journey in the Dark, just to name a few.
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Oct 29, 2013 Andrew rated it it was ok

Shelves: pulitzer-prize-fiction

Read my full review at: http://thepulitzerblog.wordpress.com/... ...more

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May 10, 2017 Anne Boardman rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Although the book feels like two distinct stories, I enjoyed both of them and can see why this book won a Pulitzer. I would have like to see a better connection between the two stories and wrapping up at the end.

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