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:[1]
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.
Grosvenor was killed in 1918 in Cantigny, France. Cather learned of his death while reading the newspaper in a hair salon. She wrote:[1]
From that on, he was in my mind. The too-personal-ness, the embarrassment of kinship, was gone. But he was in my mind so much that I couldn't get through him to other things ... some of me was buried with him in France, and some of him was left alive in me.
He was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross and a Silver Star citation for bravery under fire, of which Cather wrote:[1]
That anything so glorious could have happened to anyone so disinherited of hope. Timidly, angrily, he used to ask me about the geography of France on the wheat wagon. Well, he learned it, you see.
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."[1]
Cather was working on the novel during a visit to Canada in the summer of 1919 and finished it in Toronto in 1921.[2] 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.
Willa Sibert Cather (/ˈkæðər/;[1] born Wilella Sibert Cather; December 7, 1873[A] – April 24, 1947) was an American writer known for her novels of life on the Great Plains, including O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia. In 1923, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, a novel set during World War I.
Willa Cather and her family moved from Virginia to Webster County, Nebraska, when she was nine years old. The family later settled in the town of Red Cloud. Shortly after graduating from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Cather moved to Pittsburgh for ten years, supporting herself as a magazine editor and high school English teacher. At the age of 33, she moved to New York City, her primary home for the rest of her life, though she also traveled widely and spent considerable time at her summer residence on Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick. She spent the last 39 years of her life with her domestic partner, Edith Lewis, before being diagnosed with breast cancer and dying of a cerebral hemorrhage. She is buried alongside Lewis in a Jaffrey, New Hampshire, plot.
Cather achieved recognition as a novelist of the frontier and pioneer experience. She wrote of the spirit of those settlers moving into the western states, many of them European immigrants in the nineteenth century. Common themes in her work include nostalgia and exile. A sense of place is an important element in Cather's fiction: physical landscapes and domestic spaces are for Cather dynamic presences against which her characters struggle and find community.