From the outset of the book, she tracks the spread of a male disease of pride and fear. What may have irritated Cather’s contemporaries was not the inaccuracy of her military scenes-and there are a few howlers to be found-but the way that she demotes the war experience in favor of a longer view. Cather, who fought off the flu, makes the striking decision to elide pandemic and war into a general season of death, one for which her young American is woefully unprepared.
The virus strikes a boatload of American soldiers on their way to the European battlefields. What seized my attention, not unexpectedly, was the section devoted to the flu pandemic of 1918. When I revisited “One of Ours” in recent weeks, I found it as haunting as anything I’ve read in this bewildering year. But that’s the fascinating thing about art, anyhow that good intentions and praiseworthy industry don’t count a damn.” To Mencken, she wrote, “It may be a complete mistake.” “I expect the last part runs pretty thin,” she wrote to her friend Dorothy Canfield Fisher.
Professional resentments aside, “ One of Ours” remains a subject of debate, and is far less widely read than such Cather classics as “ O Pioneers!” and “ My Ántonia.” The author herself wondered whether she had fallen short in the culminating battlefield scenes, in which a naïve young Nebraskan named Claude Wheeler goes to his death. Griffith’s infamously racist film perhaps says more about him than it does about Cather, who rarely went to the movies. Poor woman she had to get her war experience somewhere.” Hemingway’s familiarity with D. W. I identified episode after episode, Catherized. Mencken said that its scenes of the First World War were “fought out, not in France, but on a Hollywood movie-lot.” Ernest Hemingway wrote, to Wilson, “Wasn’t that last scene in the lines wonderful? Do you know where it came from? The battle scene in Birth of a Nation. Edmund Wilson called the novel a “pretty flat failure.” H. L. It also elicited some of the most scathing criticism of her career. “One of Ours,” Willa Cather’s novel of youth, the prairie, influenza, and war, was one of the author’s greatest successes, winning her the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. Willa Cather’s “One of Ours” merges pandemic and war into a general season of death.
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