Updated: Aug 3, 2019
One of Ours
by Willa Cather
Willa Cather's "One of Ours" was published in 1922, and the following year, it became the second book by a female writer to win the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel.
Cather was a successful novelist prior to the publication of "One of Ours" having written a series of novels about frontier life on the Great Plains beginning with "O Pioneers!" in 1913. "One of Ours" took Cather on a new path with the book telling the story of Claude Wheeler, the son of a Nebraska farmer, who joins the Army during World War I and ends up on the front lines in France.
After struggling to find his purpose working on the family farm in Nebraska, Wheeler finally finds it on the battlefields of France building up to the story's final crescendo during an overpowering German onslaught in the trenches.
The book was critically savaged in many corners, but it helped Cather find a greater audience - not to mention a place in history as one of the early Pulitzer winners for fiction.