One of Ours

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CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 10.10.2011 - 302 Seiten
For understandable reasons, "One of Ours" is perhaps Willa Cather's most underrated novel. Published in 1922, only four years after the end of the First World War, it is widely regarded as Cather's "war novel" and, although she visited Europe to research the battle scenes, she admitted the difficulty of writing such a novel when she had no direct personal experience of war itself. Judged simply as a war novel, then, it is certainly lacking in many respects; one won't find realist depictions of military action here. In addition, criticism that she glorified the war and its sacrifices has haunted the book since its publication. But "One of Ours" is instead a eulogy for her cousin who served as an officer at the Western front. Only very small portions of the book actually occur during battle, and those that do are less about fighting than about a Nebraska boy who finds himself away from home, billeting with a French family and becoming friends with a fellow officer. Like some of her other works, "One of Ours" is a perceptive character sketch of a Midwestern youth struggling to escape the confinement of life on the farm. The opening chapters follow Claude Wheeler from boyhood to an abortive college career, interrupted when his father insists that he leave school to work on the farm. One of the more absorbing sections describes his informal adoption by members of the Ehrlich family, who host a faux-bohemian parlor for their college-age friends and introduce Claude to Lincoln's social giddiness, intellectual intensity, and cultural pleasures: "He had never heard a family talk so much, or with anything like so much zest." After he returns home, his life begins a less satisfactory course, first by marrying an impossible woman and then by "escaping" to the war in Europe. Readers and critics have often misunderstood Cather's novel; eighty years later, however, it's hard to see how anyone could say the novel prettifies combat. Instead, she probes, from Claude's perspective, those aspects of the war--camaraderie, adventure, patriotism--that entice young men to risk their lives. She explores the motives of those who serve their country while simultaneously lamenting the results. At the same time, she ridicules many of her usual targets--parochialism, bigotry, and righteousness--and lovingly portrays David Gerhardt, Claude's friend in Europe (who is based on a real-life violinist named David Hochstein). Taken as a whole, then, the novel is both Cather's celebratory tribute to "one of ours" and a grief-stricken remembrance of the tragic effects of war.

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Autoren-Profil (2011)

Willa Siebert Cather was born in 1873 in the home of her maternal grandmother in western Virginia. Although she had been named Willela, her family always called her "Willa." Upon graduating from the University of Nebraska in 1895, Cather moved to Pittsburgh where she worked as a journalist and teacher while beginning her writing career. In 1906, Cather moved to New York to become a leading magazine editor at McClure's Magazine before turning to writing full-time. She continued her education, receiving her doctorate of letters from the University of Nebraska in 1917, and honorary degrees from the University of Michigan, the University of California, Columbia, Yale, and Princeton. Cather wrote poetry, short stories, essays, and novels, winning awards including the Pulitzer Prize for her novel, One of Ours, about a Nebraska farm boy during World War I. She also wrote The Professor's House, My Antonia, Death Comes for the Archbishop, and Lucy Gayheart. Some of Cather's novels were made into movies, the most well-known being A Lost Lady, starring Barbara Stanwyck. In 1961, Willa Cather was the first woman ever voted into the Nebraska Hall of Fame. She was also inducted into the Hall of Great Westerners in Oklahoma in 1974, and the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca, New York in 1988. Cather died on April 24, 1947, of a cerebral hemorrhage, in her Madison Avenue, New York home, where she had lived for many years.

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