One of Ours

Willa Cather 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. In 2023, a statue of Willa Cather was placed in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol, one of the statues from the State of Nebraska. 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 essential element in Cather's fiction; physical landscapes and domestic spaces are for Cather's dynamic presence, against which her characters struggle to find community. Willa Cather's novel "One of Ours," published in 1922, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Novel in 1923. It follows the life of Claude Wheeler, who was born in Nebraska in the early decades of the 20th century and lived there for several years. Because his father was a prosperous farmer and his mother was an extremely devout Christian, he will always have a secure way to make a living. However, Wheeler sees himself as a victim of both his father's success and his unexplainable malaise. He blames both on himself. Cather's cousin Grosvenor (G.P. Cather) was born and raised on the farm that adjoined her own family, and in the character of Claude, Cather combined aspects of her personality with those of Grosvenor's.