One of Ours – Willa Cather – One of Ours is a 1922 novel by Willa Cather that won the 1923 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel. It tells the story of the life of Claude Wheeler, a Nebraska native in the first decades of the 20th century. The son of a successful farmer and an intensely pious mother, he is guaranteed a comfortable livelihood. Nevertheless, Wheeler views himself as a victim of his father’s success and his own inexplicable malaise.
Cather’s cousin Grosvenor (G.P. Cather) was born and raised on the farm that adjoined her own family’s, and she combined parts of her own personality with Grosvenor’s in the character of Claude. Cather explained in a letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher:
We were very much alike, and very different. He could never escape from the misery of being himself, except in action, and whatever he put his hand to turned out either ugly or ridiculous…. I was staying on his father’s farm when the war broke out. We spent the first week hauling wheat to town. On those long rides on the wheat, we talked for the first time in years, and I saw some of the things that were really in the back of his mind…. I had no more thought of writing a story about him than of writing about my own nose. It was all too painfully familiar. It was just to escape from him and his kind that I wrote at all.
Cather was unhappy that the novel ‘will be classed as a war story’, which was not her intention. She departed from her previous practice of writing about the western life she knew well to write this story set partly in military life and overseas only because ‘it stood between me and anything else.’
Cather was working on the novel during a visit to Canada in the summer of 1919 and finished it in Toronto in 1921. She used her cousin’s letters and those of David Hochstein, a New York violinist who served as the model for Claude’s wartime friend David Gerhardt. She interviewed veterans and wounded soldiers in hospitals, focusing especially on the experience of rural Nebraskans she profiled in a magazine article, ‘Roll Call on the Prairie’. She visited the French battlefields as well.
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