One of Ours by Willa Cather

Introduction

Willa Cather was the daughter of a Baptist farmer in Virginia to the world, the big family but nine years later moved to Nebraska, a state which was at that time still as a western border region. The growth in rural Nebraska was central to the development of literature Cathers. She studied English Literature at the University of Nebraska, made in 1894 graduated, and worked during the study already is a freelance journalist and theater critic.

In 1896, she moved to Pittsburgh, where she taught at a high school English and Latin, and wrote for several magazines. In 1906, she moved to New York and worked as an editor for McClure's Magazine, where in 1912 her first novel, Alexander's Bridge, appeared in serial form. In subsequent years, she wrote her famous prairie trilogy O Pioneers (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915) and My Antonia (1918) (Woodress, pp. 205). In 1923, awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her novel “One of Ours”. She enjoyed enormous prestige among critics and audiences and has received numerous awards and honorary doctorates from several universities.

Many of Cather's novels play in rural America and deal with the hard life of immigrants in the prairies of Nebraska, a subject that she and her mentor the advice girlfriend Sarah Orne Jewett owed. They even preferred the city life and living for decades in New York. Despite her fame, she lived in retirement. To questions of the time they did not comment. Her homosexual life shielded from it. Before her death, she destroyed her private papers.

Willa Cather's “One of Ours” was a pivotal novel in the career of the writer, and she marked her author's literary explorations of socially controversial topics of war and race, respectively. “One of Ours” won Cather the Pulitzer Prize; yet this novel puzzled and frustrated many critics for its overly romanticized portrait of warfare during World War I (Stout, pp. 43).

Discussion

Willa Cather awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 1923 for “One of Ours”. Nearly all of her twelve novels and her short stories and poetry rooted in her experiences growing up in Red Cloud, Nebraska; “One of Ours” is no exception. Ultimately, the novel takes Claude Wheeler to the battlefields of France during World War I (Skaggs, pp. 4), but everything he experiences filtered through his youth on a Nebraska farm and in a small town.

The novel is not autobiographical, but in midlife, Cather had moved to New York also had traveled to Europe. These experiences reflected in “One of Ours” with allusions, for example, to the Statue of Liberty and with a prosaic description of New York City seen through smog. Her detailed descriptions of the French countryside also come from direct knowledge.

On one level, “One of Ours” is a coming-of-age story, or bildungsroman. Claude also symbolizes a young America that also forced to reexamine itself because of World War I. The country had to mature, become less isolated, and become more cynical. Cather complicates this genre by allowing ...