One of Ours

By: Willa Cather

Narrated by: Kristen Underwood

Pulitzer Prize Winner, The Novel, 1923

Willa Cather's Pulitzer Prize winning narrative tells of the making of a young American soldier. Claude Wheeler, the sensitive, aspiring protagonist, resembles the youngest son of a peculiarly American fairy tale. His fortune is ready-made for him, but he refuses to settle for it. Alienated from his crass father and pious mother, all but rejected by a wife who reserves her ardor for missionary work, and dissatisfied with farming, Claude is an idealist without an ideal to cling to. It is only when his country enters the First World War that Claude finds what he has been searching for all his life.

In One of Ours, Willa Cather explores the destiny of a grandchild of the pioneers, a young Nebraskan whose yearnings impel him toward a frontier bloodier and more distant than the one that vanished before his birth. It is a canny and vital portrait of an American psyche at once skeptical and romantic, restless and heroic.

(P)1998 Blackstone Audio Inc.

Finely crafted anti-war novel

Willa Cather's Pulitzer Prize winning 1922 novel of a young Nebraska farm boy's experience in The Great War. Highly recommended.

Cather's writing is impeccable

One of Ours by Willa Cather was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. Although I really enjoyed this book I did like her book, My Antonia better. But her ability to create a peaceful and calm book about war kind of blue me away. Her writing is so careful and sweet. I read her books and just get carried into the story. I feel like I know the characters and that they are friends.

I love books about war and its affect on both the members of the military and the civilians trying to survive, but in this book I favored the first half before our main character went to war. Life at the beginning of the 20th century, on the family farm in Nebraska was described beautifully. I felt transported to the time and place. I had empathy for our character who found himself in a life he didn't necessarily want. Once he left for the war, I kept hoping that he would survive, return home, and that we would see the struggles to make a family and a marriage work. I wanted to see what happens to the family unit not just the one person.

But Cather's characters are so well-drawn and so real that I find myself feeling compassionate for them despite the times when I disagree with their words and / or actions. They are flawed, but likable. They make life mistakes, do or say wrong things, but they are never cartoonish or unlikable.

Coming of Age/World War I Story

Half the book is about Claude's coming of age in the Midwest. He becomes disappointed with life as he grows into adulthood. He has to take over the family farm and end his university studies. Not only that, but he marries someone he shouldn't have. Cather writes well, but the protagonist and his plight is far from compelling. The other half is about Claude joining the military and fighting in World War I. Perhaps it's unfair, but I couldn't help but compare this to All Quiet on the Western Front. And the latter book covers all aspects of that war -- its horror and senselessness, its costs in lives and humanity -- much, much better.

Additionally, a lot of minor storylines are left unresolved. For example, his wife goes to China to help her ailing missionary sister and that's it. We never hear about her again.

Claude search

Would you listen to One of Ours again? Why?

Yes. In fact, I plan to. I feel Cather has delivered a meaningful novel but I am too ignorant to translate it. I have marked this as re-readable because I want to read it again a few years from now. I would to relive Claude's struggle and perhaps understand him better than I did this time around. He deserves as much.

What was one of the most memorable moments of One of Ours?

There are several memorable moments to this book. There was the time when Claude first found happiness in education - and then his father callously broke him. The last scene in the book was also quite memorable....but has admittedly caused me much confusion. I won't go into other examples so as not to spoil the story but they also don't seem to matter. I have fully accepted that I probably do not quite understand the book....but the more I think of it the more I question whether the book is about Claude at all....that it is instead about the change in American culture and customs from an Agricultural based economy to a more technology and convenience driven economy. I remain quite confused on the title.
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How could the performance have been better?

Underwood's performance was very mechanical to me. Part of the joy of audiobooks is the benefit of having a bit of emotional play to the narration. Underwood was dry and business-like. I also didn't like how her voice made Claude's voice seem more feminine and tender.

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

It left me confused. It has been awhile since I have thought so much about a book after reading it. I have read dozens of reviews from others; 3-4 analyses of the book; a terribly-written college essay found on the internet. I feel like the book wants to tell me something and I want to hear it....I'm just not ready yet.

An honest portrait of the Great War's American Fighting Man

An honest portrait of the Great War's American Fighting Man

Because my reading overlaps eras and genres, particularly my chronological reading of Pulitzer and Nobel Prize Winners as well as my chronological reading of American presidential biographies, I have found myself over several years and a few dozen books studying this era of America at war. Having only engaged in one foreign war prior to World War One, in comparison to the European powers which had been at states of Wars for nearly two thousand years, most European nations viewed America as both a hesitant and generally inexperienced military force who, though well armed, weren't seen as particularly formidable. After years of a national leadership generally steering us away from conflict, even after numerous neutral American ships and citizens had met watery deaths by German U-Boats, this uniquely American political quirk of post election U-Turns found America rapidly sending millions of tons of armament and food along with nearly five million American fighting men, quickly changed the way "the Great Powers" viewed American indispensability.

Also uniquely American is Willa Cather's blunt and clear eyed portrayal of this mass of immigrant American farm boys, machinists, bricklayers, stevedores, robber baron's sons and the panoply of whites, blacks, Jews, Muslims, Native American, Mexicans, Asians and Pacific Islanders who donned America's uniform of war to save the world from German domination. in One of Ours, for which she won the 1923 #pulitzerprizeforfiction , Cather focuses on one Nebraska Doughboy, of a wealthy farming clan, newly married to a woman who is driven more by a call for missionary service than matrimonial bliss, who is one of the first to sign up when America called up her own. A strapping young Lieutenant leading other strong back, well fed American boys to fight in places they could barely pronounce with an inexplicable willingness and ferocity in what they felt was the last best hope to preserve democracy from a nation of German supremacists bent on global germanization. It's a beautiful and unsparing story that along with our new industry of cinema, gave the world its first unfiltered view of Americans.

This story will stay with me for some time because it so eloquently demonstrates what America is and what the world can be when it isn't just America First.

Slow and Boring....zzzz

I purchased this book because I really liked My Antonia, a masterpiece of Cather. I have read O'Pioneers-beautiful, but not like My Antonia. One of Ours was disappointing. Slow moving all throughout and the end was of no event.