One of Ours

Willa Cather Cather

Description

Willa Cather’s profound Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is an almost serene World War I story. One of Ours captures the inner depths of ordinary people and delves into their everyday thoughts and lives.

Claude Wheeler is struggling to find direction for his life. Under his parents’ wishes, he is studying at a Christian college, but he lacks the devout, pious attitude that comes so easily to his mother. When his father expands the family farm, Claude finds himself having to leave university, return home to Nebraska, and help his parents to manage the successful land. Soon, he finds himself in a loveless marriage with even less hope for the future than before.

The second half of this thought-provoking volume commences as the US joins World War I. Leaving behind everything he knows, Claude signs up to the US Army and is stationed in France. Could this be his life’s purpose? How will the turmoil of war impact a young man raised in the countryside?

This 1922 masterpiece won Willa Cather a Pulitzer Prize in 1923. The remarkable story is accompanied by an introductory essay by H. L. Mencken in this brand new edition, and is not to be missed by fans of historical fiction or collectors of Cather’s work.

Sujets

• Historical
• World War I
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Read Books Ltd.
• Date de parution: 26 septembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781528798013
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

ONE OF OURS
By
WILLA CATHER
WITH AN EXCERPT BY H. L. MENCKEN

First published in 1922



Copyright © 2022 Read & Co. Classics
This edition is published by Read & Co. Classics, an imprint of Read & Co.
This book is copyright and may not be reproduced or copied in any way without the express permission of the publisher in writing.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Read & Co. is part of Read Books Ltd. For more information visit www.readandcobooks.co.uk


Contents
WILLA CATHER
An Excerpt by H . L. Mencken
BOOK ONE
ON LOVELY CREEK
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
IX
BOOK TWO
ENID
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
BOOK THREE
SUNRISE ON THE PRAIRIE
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
BOOK FOUR
THE VOYAGE OF THE ANCHISES
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
BOOK FIVE
"BIDDING THE EAGLES OF THE WEST FLY ON"
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX


WILLA CATHER
An Excerpt by H. L. Mencken
Four or five years ago, though she already had a couple of good books behind her, Willa Cather was scarcely heard of. When she was mentioned at all, it was as a talented but rather inconsequential imitator of Mrs. Wharton. But today even campus-pump critics are more or less aware of her, and one hears no more gabble about imitations. The plain fact is that she is now discovered to be a novelist of original methods and quite extraordinary capacities—penetrating and accurate in observation, delicate in feeling, brilliant and charming in manner, and full of a high sense of the dignity and importance of her work. Bit by bit, patiently and laboriously, she has mastered the trade of the novelist; in each succeeding book she has shown an unmistakable advance. Now, at last, she has arrived at such a command of all the complex devices and expedients of her art that the use she makes of them is quite concealed. Her style has lost self-consciousness; her grasp of form has become instinctive; her drama is firmly rooted in a sound psychology; her people relate themselves logically to the great race masses that they are parts of. In brief, she knows her business thoroughly, and so one gets out of reading her, not only the facile joy that goes with every good story, but also the vastly higher pleasure that is called forth by first-rate cr aftsmanship.
I know of no novel that makes the remote folk of the western farmlands more real than My Antonía makes them, and I know of none that makes them seem better worth knowing. Beneath the tawdry surface of Middle Western barbarism—so suggestive, in more than one way, of the vast, impenetrable barbarism of Russia—she discovers human beings bravely embattled against fate and the gods, and into her picture of their dull, endless struggle she gets a spirit that is genuinely heroic, and a pathos that is genuinely moving. It is not as they see themselves that she depicts them, but as they actually are. And to representation she adds something more—something that is quite beyond the reach, and even beyond the comprehension of the average novelist. Her poor peasants are not simply anonymous and negligible hinds, flung by fortune into lonely, inhospitable wilds. They become symbolical, as, say, Robinson Crusoe is symbolical, or Faust, or Lord Jim. They are actors in a play that is far larger than the scene swept by their own pitiful suffering and aspiration. They are actors in the grand farce that is the tra gedy of man.
Setting aside certain early experiments in both prose and verse, Miss Cather began with Alexander’s Bridge in 1912. The book strongly suggested the method and materials of Mrs. Wharton, and so it was inevitably, perhaps, that the author should be plastered with the Wharton label. I myself, ass-like, helped to slap it on—though with prudent reservations, now comforting to contemplate. The defect of the story was one of locale and people: somehow one got the feeling that the author was dealing with both at second-hand, that she knew her characters a bit less intimately than she should have known them. This defect, I venture to guess, did not escape her own eye. At all events, she abandoned New England in her next novel for the Middle West, and particularly for the Middle West of the great immigrations—a region nearer at hand, and infinitely better comprehended. The result was O Pioneers (1913), a book of very fine achievement and of even finer promise. Then came The Song of the Lark (1915)—still more competent, more searching and convincing, better in every way. And then, after three years, came My Antonía, and a sudden leap forward. Here, at last, an absolutely sound technique began to show itself. Here was a novel planned with the utmost skill, and executed in truly admirable fashion. Here, unless I err gravely, was the best piece of fiction ever done by a woman in America.
I once protested to Miss Cather that her novels came too far apart—that the reading public, constantly under a pressure of new work, had too much chance to forget her. She was greatly astonished. “How could I do any more?” she asked. “I work all the time. It takes three years to write a novel.” The saying somehow clings to me. There is a profound criticism of criticism in it. It throws a bright light upon the difference between such a work as My Antonía and such a work as—. . . But I have wars enough.
An e xcerpt from Willa Cather, The Borzoi, 1920






BOOK ONE
ON LOVELY CREEK


I
Claude Wheeler opened his eyes before the sun was up and vigorously shook his younger brother, who lay in the other half of t he same bed.
"Ralph, Ralph, get awake! Come down and help me wa sh the car."
"What for?"
"Why, aren't we going to the ci rcus today?"
"Car's all right. Let me alone." The boy turned over and pulled the sheet up to his face, to shut out the light which was beginning to come through the curtainl ess windows.
Claude rose and dressed,—a simple operation which took very little time. He crept down two flights of stairs, feeling his way in the dusk, his red hair standing up in peaks, like a cock's comb. He went through the kitchen into the adjoining washroom, which held two porcelain stands with running water. Everybody had washed before going to bed, apparently, and the bowls were ringed with a dark sediment which the hard, alkaline water had not dissolved. Shutting the door on this disorder, he turned back to the kitchen, took Mahailey's tin basin, doused his face and head in cold water, and began to plaster down h is wet hair.
Old Mahailey herself came in from the yard, with her apron full of corn-cobs to start a fire in the kitchen stove. She smiled at him in the foolish fond way she often had with him when they were alone.
"What air you gittin' up for a-ready, boy? You goin' to the circus before breakfast? Don't you make no noise, else you'll have 'em all down here before I git my fi re a-goin'."
"All right, Mahailey." Claude caught up his cap and ran out of doors, down the hillside toward the barn. The sun popped up over the edge of the prairie like a broad, smiling face; the light poured across the close-cropped August pastures and the hilly, timbered windings of Lovely Creek, a clear little stream with a sand bottom, that curled and twisted playfully about through the south section of the big Wheeler ranch. It was a fine day to go to the circus at Frankfort, a fine day to do anything; the sort of day that must, somehow, tu rn out well.
Claude backed the little Ford car out of its shed, ran it up to the horse-tank, and began to throw water on the mud-crusted wheels and windshield. While he was at work the two hired men, Dan and Jerry, came shambling down the hill to feed the stock. Jerry was grumbling and swearing about something, but Claude wrung out his wet rags and, beyond a nod, paid no attention to them. Somehow his father always managed to have the roughest and dirtiest hired men in the country working for him. Claude had a grievance against Jerry just now, because of his treatment of one of the horses.
Molly was a faithful old mare, the mother of many colts; Claude and his younger brother had learned to ride on her. This man Jerry, taking her out to work one morning, let her step on a board with a nail sticking up in it. He pulled the nail out of her foot, said nothing to anybody, and drove her to the cultivator all day. Now she had been standing in her stall for weeks, patiently suffering, her body wretchedly thin, and her leg swollen until it looked like an elephant's. She would have to stand there, the veterinary said, until her hoof came off and she grew a new one, and she would always be stiff. Jerry had not been discharged, and he exhibited the poor animal as if she were a cr edit to him.
Mahailey came out on the hilltop and rang the breakfast bell. After the hired men went up to the house, Claude slipped into the barn to see that Molly had got her share of oats. She was eating quietly, her head hanging, and her scaly, dead-looking foot lifted just a little from the ground. When he stroked her neck and talked to her she stopped grinding and gazed at him mournfully. She knew him, and wrinkled her nose and drew her upper lip back from her worn teeth, to show that she liked being petted. She let him touch her foot and exam ine her leg.
When Claude reac