One of Ours

On the windswept Nebraska prairie, a young man searches for meaning he cannot name. Claude Wheeler has everything a farming family could offer, land, opportunity, a future laid out before him, yet something in him chafes against a life that feels like a costume he never chose. His restless spirit finds brief illumination through the Ehrlichs, German immigrants who open his eyes to possibilities beyond the Wheeler farm, and through a marriage to Enid that promises everything yet delivers only loneliness. When America enters the Great War, Claude discovers in combat the purpose that Nebraska could never provide him. Willa Cather transforms what could have been a simple tale of a young man's coming-of-age into something richer and stranger: an examination of American longing, the invisible labor that builds a nation, and the price a generation paid for someone else's glory. This Pulitzer Prize-winning novel remains one of the most compassionate portraits of ordinary striving in American literature. It is for readers who understand that some lives contain entire universes of quiet desperation and quiet grace.