One of Ours

One of Ours is a novel by American writer Willa Cather, published in 1922 and awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1923. Its protagonist, Claude Wheeler, is born into a prosperous Nebraska farming family—his father shrewd and capable, his mother devout and domestic. Wanting for nothing materially, he nonetheless feels a persistent spiritual emptiness and cannot find meaning in life. While studying at Temple College, he befriends the Ehrlichs, a family devoted to music and free debate, and for a time aspires to a broader intellectual world; but when his father expands the farm, he is forced to leave school and return to work the land, his ideals thwarted. He later marries Enid, a childhood acquaintance, only to find that his wife is more devoted to religion and overseas missionary work than to their marriage, which exists in name only. After Enid leaves for China to care for her ailing sister, Claude moves back to the farm and lives alone. When the First World War breaks out and the United States enters the conflict, he enlists with enthusiasm and sails with the army to France, where amid the trenches and artillery fire he feels needed and recognized for the first time, and is gradually drawn into the maelstrom of the 1918 influenza pandemic and the fierce fighting at the front, until he falls on French soil. The first two books of the novel portray daily life and its stifling constraints on the Western plains; the latter two turn to the brutality and absurdity of the war in France, interweaving the spiritual dislocation that followed the end of the pioneer era with the experience of war, and carrying an implicit critique of romanticized wartime propaganda. The book is divided into five parts: On Lovely Creek, Enid, Sunrise on the Prairie, The Voyage of the Anchises, and Bidding the Eagles of the West Fly On. The Chinese edition is translated by Hu Die.