One of Ours (1922) - Willa Cather

Written by Willa Cather
Read by Joel Richards
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps

· Length: 13 hrs and 24 mins
· Release date: 08-02-22
· Publisher: Dreamscape Media, LLC

Willa Cather’s 1923 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel tells of the making of a young American soldier is based on her cousin’s life

Claude Wheeler, the sensitive, aspiring protagonist, resembles the youngest son of a peculiarly American fairy tale. His fortune is ready-made for him, but he refuses to settle for it. Claude wants to attend the State University but instead lives a typical college life as a Temple College student. However, when his successful father decides to expand the family farm, Claude’s reality is changed forever as he’s forced to drop out to help realize his father’s dream.

Alienated from his crass father and pious mother, and all but rejected by a wife who reserves her ardor for missionary work, and dissatisfied with farming, Claude is an idealist without an ideal to cling to. It is only when his country enters the First World War that Claude finds the purpose he has been searching for all his life. His yearnings impel him toward a frontier wilder and more violent than the one tamed by his pioneer ancestors.

“Although there are WWI battle scenes in Willa Cather’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, the most important action is all in the mind of its main character. Claude Wheeler seeks a place in the world that is independent of the expectations of his family and the world of rural Nebraska. Narrator Joel Richards focuses on the interiority of the story without minimizing Claude’s complex and difficult connections with the world outside his head. The people around him come to life despite Claude’s difficulties in understanding his true relationships with them. (He may be on the autism spectrum.) Despite the character’s confusion and indecision, Richards remains interesting and sympathetic in portraying him.”— AudioFile 2022,

Goodreads—“ One of the fascinations for me is that people are people are people. Although there was a gentler and more polite tone within and between people, they still had the same thoughts and feelings and wonderings as people in our current times.

Willa Cather’s writing has a way of discovering the inner depths of people and through their thoughts and impressions; we feel their feelings and experience their thoughts. One of the old-timers who had settled this area of Nebraska many years ago . . . had watched the farms emerge one by one from the great rolling page where once only the wind wrote its story.”

Prose that is poetry….