![]() Cather’s construction of the fictional patriarch of the Wheeler clan is nuanced. Though Nat Wheeler is a big, powerful man who owns much property, he is content to allow others to work his land, renting pasture and cropland to local farmers who are down on their luck. Set in pre-Great War Nebraska on the Wheeler place, a farm owned by Nat and Evangeline Wheeler, a large spread where the parents have raised their three boys: Bayliss, Claude, and Ralph, One of Ours isn’t the stereotypical novel of hard luck and tragedy that we’ve come to expect from farm stories of its time. But in the end, in the hands of a master storyteller like Willa Cather, One of Ours satisfies both as to craft and plot. At first, attempting to meld those two distinct brands of invented lives might seem a bit awkward, forced, or even foolhardy. But few of us, I am fairly certain, outside of serious students of Cather’s work, have heard of, much less read, One of Ours, a tale that straddles two genres, that of Plains hardscrabble fiction and war novel. ![]() Most of us at one point or another in our reading careers have read Death Comes for the Archbishop, O Pioneers!, and My Antonia by acclaimed American Plains and Western novelist, Willa Cather. ![]()
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