“In that period there is abundant material for a penetrating and ironical novel…No other participating nation was so safe from all peril in the war, and yet none other was so horribly scared or so shameless about revealing it.” Claude’s native disillusionment with everything around him, which defines his life over and over again, gets entirely swept away when he goes to war.īut in the part of the novel that takes place in Nebraska, this type of social critique abounds. “The grotesque and inordinate monkey-shines that went on at home-the loan drives, the cadging for the YMCA and Red Cross, the looting of enemy nationals, the spy-hunt, all the other patriotic whoop-las of the period,” he wrote. In his review of the book, Mencken thought Cather should have looked at what happened on the home front during the war, rather than trying to understand the combat experience of a soldier. 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.”Ĭlaude’s observations about the town and state where he lives are mordant and cutting.

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. These critics read the heroic wartime section of the book literally, which is a strange failure of comprehension.

Poor woman, she had to get her war experience somewhere.” (Hemingway was bitter over the novel’s “big sales,” and it showed.) I identified episode after episode, Catherized.

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.”īut the most memorable comment was one that Ernest Hemingway wrote to Edmund Wilson in a 1923 letter: “Wasn’t last scene in the lines wonderful? Do you know where it came from? The battle scene in Birth of a Nation. Reviewing the book in The Smart Set, H.L. When Willa Cather’s fifth novel, One of Ours, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923, it was divisive among critics.

Willa cather pulitzer prize book