When Claude returns home after a brief stint at university, which has given him a taste of the wider world, Cather nicely describes his mixed feelings: “When he came up the hill like this, toward the tall house with its lighted windows, something always clutched at his heart. He fears that real life is passing him by. Claude is torn between commitment to home and family and a vague longing for something loftier. It tells the story of Claude Wheeler, a young man growing up on a farm in small-town Frankfort, Nebraska, at the turn of the twentieth century. ONE OF OURS IS A WORLD WAR I NOVEL-or, better, a novel about the quest for manhood, to which World War I forms the backdrop. It also proves unexpectedly relevant today, at a time of renewed warfare in Europe and conflict in the Middle East. Touched by a mood that Taylor aptly characterizes as “elegiac grief,” the novel explores conservative themes that were central to Cather’s fiction. Those reactions notwithstanding-and they were balanced by plenty of positive reviews- One of Ours is well worth revisiting. Mencken, Heywood Broun, and Edmund Wilson. Taylor quotes sharply negative assessments from such critics as H.L. Forgive me, Willa.Įven though it was the book for which she won the Pulitzer, One of Ours is not generally ranked among Cather’s best novels. Only after Christmas did I finally get around to it. All year long, I kept planning to read the novel all year long, I kept putting it off. The year 2023 was actually a double Cather anniversary: It marked not only 150 years since her birth, but also the 100th anniversary of her winning the Pulitzer Prize for the novel One of Ours. In his prologue, Taylor suggests a possible reason for Cather’s relative neglect: her “antagonism to the times in which she lived.” He writes, “She alone among the moderns wrote with unguarded admiration about the antique virtues: valor, loyalty, fulfillment of some high destiny.” Admiration for the antique virtues-in some circles, at least, that can indeed make one a literary afterthought.Īnd now I have done it to her again, despite my best intentions. One exception was Benjamin Taylor’s biography, Chasing Bright Medusas, a concise introduction to Cather’s life and work-and, at under 200 pages, just right for readers who lack time for the 800-page tomes that seem to dominate the genre. Unlike the centenary of Joyce’s Ulysses in 2022, which produced a wave of new Joyce publications, the Cather anniversary produced almost none. Indeed, few people seemed to notice that last year marked the 150th anniversary of her birth in 1873. Cather surely deserves to be considered alongside the others, but somehow she always seems to remain in their shadow-a literary afterthought. Ponder a bit longer and you might eventually recall a name that I did not encounter on that list: Willa Cather. CALL TO MIND GREAT AMERICAN AUTHORS of the early twentieth century and you will probably think of names like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Steinbeck, all of whom made the reading list for my 11th-grade American literature class many years ago.
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