Willa Cather's Pulitzer Prize-winning narrative tells of the making of a young American
soldier. Claude Wheeler, the sensitive, aspiring protagonist, resembles the youngest son of a peculiarly
American fairy tale. His fortune is ready-made for him, but he refuses to settle for it. Alienated from his
crass father and pious mother, all but rejected by a wife who reserves her ardor for missionary work, and
dissatisfied with farming, Claude is an idealist without an ideal to cling to. It is only when his country
enters the First World War that Claude finds what he has been searching for all his life.

In One of Ours, Willa Cather explores the destiny of a grandchild of the pioneers, a young Nebraskan
whose yearnings impel him toward a frontier bloodier and more distant than the one that vanished before his
birth. It is a canny and vital portrait of an American psyche at once skeptical and romantic, restless and
heroic.