Novel: One of Ours

Overview
Willa Cather’s One of Ours follows Claude Wheeler, the sensitive younger son of a prosperous Nebraska farmer, as he struggles against the confinement of prairie life and an ill-suited marriage before finding a tragic, exalted sense of purpose in World War I. The novel moves from sun-bleached fields and small-town routines to troop ships and French villages, tracing a consciousness hungry for meaning and beauty. It blends domestic realism with a wartime chronicle, charting how a restless American idealist briefly locates the life he yearned for just as history is poised to destroy it.

Nebraska and the thwarted self
Claude grows up under the blunt, practical authority of his father and the tender, unassuming care of his mother. He chafes at expectations that he will be a farmer like his father and his pragmatic brothers, Bayliss and Ralph. College in Lincoln offers a glimpse of a broader world, books, music, and the warmth of the Erlich family, yet circumstances pull him back to the homestead. There he manages hired hands alongside the loyal housekeeper Mahailey, shouldering chores that feel like a sentence rather than a vocation. The prairie provides space but not scope; the horizon seems to promise more than it delivers.

Marriage and spiritual famine
Seeking steadiness and companionship, Claude marries Enid Royce, a temperance-minded young woman whose zeal for self-denial and missionary causes clashes with his unformed but fervent desires for joy, intimacy, and shared discovery. Their union, chaste and cheerless, intensifies his loneliness. Enid’s scruples extend to the smallest corners of daily life, and their home becomes a place of quiet deprivation. When her missionary sister abroad falls ill, Enid departs to nurse her, leaving Claude to the farm and a winnowed domestic life that now feels both a personal failure and a moral cul-de-sac. His vague discontent hardens into a sense that life’s true current is running elsewhere.

War and awakening
The entry of the United States into World War I strikes Claude as both summons and release. Enlisting, he feels the first clear harmony between inner impulse and outward circumstance. Training, command responsibilities, and the passage to Europe draw him into a fellowship he has never known. On shipboard and in French billets, he encounters men of varied backgrounds, including the cultivated musician David Gerhardt, whose intelligence, humor, and courage animate the ideals he has long cherished inarticulately. In the villages of northern France, amid battered churches and resilient households, he experiences a culture that values nuance, history, and beauty, confirming the half-formed instincts that once made him restless on the plains.

Frontline and fate
At the front, the exhilaration of purpose mixes with mud, illness, and sudden death. Claude proves a steady, brave officer, attentive to his men and quick to act. The camaraderie he forges feels like a home finally found, yet it exists in the shadow of attrition. Moments of grace, shared meals with French civilians, a quiet mass in a cracked nave, the companionship of comrades, are bracketed by bombardment and loss. In an action that epitomizes both his devotion and the waste of the conflict, Claude is killed before the Armistice, his vision of a life remade sealed in an instant of violence.

Aftermath and design
News of his death returns to Nebraska, where his mother, who always sensed a radiance in him that the farm could not absorb, holds the memory of a son who briefly reached his measure. The novel frames Claude’s journey as the collision of a temperament with its historical hour, suggesting how a provincial life can carry within it a vast, inarticulate longing that only an extraordinary crisis can voice. One of Ours renders war neither as spectacle nor simple condemnation, but as the fatal medium through which a particular American idealist glimpses the world he had imagined since boyhood.