Willa Cather

One of Ours illustrated Willa Cather

One of Ours is a novel by Willa Cather which won the 1923 Pulitzer Prize. It tells the story of the life of Claude Wheeler, a native of Nebraska around the turn of the 20th century. The son of a successful mid-western farmer and an intensely pious mother, thus guaranteed a comfortable livelihood, Claude Wheeler nonetheless views himself as a victim of his father's success and his own inexplicable malaise. One of Ours is a portrait of a peculiarly American personality: it is the story of a young man born after the American frontier has vanished, yet whose quintessentially American restlessness seeks redemption on a frontier far bloodier and more distant than that which his forefathers had already tamed.