Novel
One of Ours
Willa Cather · 1922
Synopsis
Claude Wheeler, a Nebraska farmer's son, takes courses he loves in Lincoln and frequents a cultured family fond of music and discussion, until his father calls him back to run the farm. While he courts Enid Royce, a devout young woman, war breaks out in Europe. He marries her; she soon leaves for China to care for her missionary sister. After the United States enters the war, he enlists, crosses the Atlantic on a ship where influenza cuts down the men, and finds in France a comradeship he had never known.
Context
The hero is modelled on a cousin of the author, killed at Cantigny in May 1918. The book appears from Knopf in September 1922 and receives the Pulitzer Prize the following year. Mencken judged that the war section fell to the level of a serial in a women's magazine; Sinclair Lewis praised the Nebraska pages and found those of the front weak; Ernest Hemingway, who had been an ambulance driver in Italy, mocked in a letter a battle taken from the cinema. It was unfavourably compared with a war novel by John Dos Passos.
Who it is for
A long novel, in five books: the first three in Nebraska, the last two at sea and in France. Translated into French by Marc Chénetier.
Prizes and reception
Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1923. Twelve thousand orders before publication and two printings straight away; the unfavourable reviews did not dent sales.
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