She used her cousin's letters and those of David Hochstein, a New York violinist who served as the model for Claude's wartime friend David Gerhardt. She departed from her previous practice of writing about the western life she knew well to write this story set partly in military life and overseas only because 'it stood between me and anything else.' Ĭather was working on the novel during a visit to Canada in the summer of 1919 and finished it in Toronto in 1921. Well, he learned it, you see.Ĭather was unhappy that the novel 'will be classed as a war story', which was not her intention. Timidly, angrily, he used to ask me about the geography of France on the wheat wagon. That anything so glorious could have happened to anyone so disinherited of hope. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross and a Silver Star citation for bravery under fire, of which Cather wrote:

some of me was buried with him in France, and some of him was left alive in me. But he was in my mind so much that I couldn't get through him to other things. The too-personal-ness, the embarrassment of kinship, was gone. She wrote: įrom that on, he was in my mind. Cather learned of his death while reading the newspaper in a hair salon. Grosvenor was killed in 1918 in Cantigny, France. It was just to escape from him and his kind that I wrote at all. I had no more thought of writing a story about him than of writing about my own nose. On those long rides on the wheat, we talked for the first time in years, and I saw some of the things that were really in the back of his mind. We spent the first week hauling wheat to town. I was staying on his father's farm when the war broke out. He could never escape from the misery of being himself, except in action, and whatever he put his hand to turned out either ugly or ridiculous. We were very much alike, and very different. Cather explained in a letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher: Cather) was born and raised on the farm that adjoined her own family's, and she combined parts of her own personality with Grosvenor's in the character of Claude. Nevertheless, Wheeler views himself as a victim of his father's success and his own inexplicable malaise.Ĭather's cousin Grosvenor (G.P. The son of a successful farmer and an intensely pious mother, he is guaranteed a comfortable livelihood. It tells the story of the life of Claude Wheeler, a Nebraska native in the first decades of the 20th century. One of Ours is a 1922 novel by Willa Cather that won the 1923 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel.

Willa cather pulitzer prize book