When Willa Cather’s fifth novel, One of Ours, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923, it was divisive among critics. Reviewing the book in The Smart Set, H.L. Mencken wrote that the first half, which is about protagonist Claude Weaver’s young adult years on a farm in Nebraska, was very good, and the second, which follows Claude to France and the trenches in World War I, operated “at the level of a serial in the Ladies’ Home Journal.” Playwright Sidney Howard wrote in Bookman: “It seems to me a book to show what a woman can write supremely and what she cannot write at all… the pity is that Miss Cather did not know war for the big bowwow stuff that it is and stick to her own farms and farmer folk.”
But the most memorable comment was one that Ernest Hemingway wrote to Edmund Wilson in a 1923 letter: “Wasn’t [the novel’s] last scene in the lines wonderful? Do you know where it came from? The battle scene in Birth of a Nation. I identified episode after episode, Catherized. Poor woman, she had to get her war experience somewhere.” (Hemingway was bitter over the novel’s “big sales,” and it showed.)
These critics read the heroic wartime section of the book literally, which is a strange failure of comprehension. Some of them (mostly women) got it. In the San Francisco Chronicle, Nancy Barr Mavity observed: “One of Ours reads like a book written during the war instead of after the shock of awakening. Can Miss Cather be as simple as all that? No, but Claude is, and the identification of the author with the character is so perfect that not a line of criticism, of ironical comment is allowed to seep through.”
The character of Claude was initially inspired by G.P. Cather, a Nebraskan cousin of the writer’s, who died in France and was hailed as a hero. While she was writing it, Cather called the project, fondly, Claude. She was eventually convinced to change the title, in consideration of possible market appeal, but perhaps she should have kept it. The best way to read the book is as a deeply sympathetic character study of Claude, a Midwesterner born on a prosperous farm who is deeply unhappy with his life. It’s written from his perspective, and he’s nothing if not a romantic.