Her first novel, Alexander’s Bridge, appeared in serial form in McClure’ s in 1912. There she joined McClure’s magazine, a popular muckraking periodical that encouraged the writing of new young authors.Īfter meeting the author Sarah Orne Jewett, she decided to quit journalism and devote herself full time to fiction. By the time she went to the University of Nebraska in 1891–where she began by wearing boy’s clothes and cut her hair close to her head–she had decided to be a writer.Īfter graduation she worked for a Lincoln, Nebraska, newspaper, then moved to Pittsburgh and finally to New York City. The oldest of seven children, she was educated at home, studied Latin with a neighbor, and read the English classics in the evening. Because she is so famous for her Nebraska novels, many people assume she was born there, but Willa Cather was about nine years old when her family moved to a small Nebraska frontier town called Red Cloud that was populated by immigrant Swedes, Bohemians, Germans, Poles, Czechs, and Russians. Willa Cather was probably born in Virginia in 1873, although her parents did not register the date, and it is probably incorrectly given on her tombstone. In doing so, she creates a canny and extraordinarily vital portrait of an American psyche at once skeptical and romantic, restless and heroic. 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 only when his country enters the First World War that Claude finds what he has been searching for all his life.
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. His fortune is ready-made for him, but he refuses to settle for it. Willa Cather's Pulitzer Prize-winning narrative of the making of a young American soldierĬlaude Wheeler, the sensitive, aspiring protagonist of this beautifully modulated novel, resembles the youngest son of a peculiarly American fairy tale.
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