One of Ours by Willa Cather
Join us on Thursday November 2 at 3pm or 6:30pm.
About the book:
Willa Cather's Pulitzer Prize-winning narrative of the making of a young American soldier. Claude Wheeler, the sensitive, aspiring protagonist of this beautifully modulated novel, resembles the youngest son of a peculiarly American fairy tale. His fortune is ready-made for him, but he refuses to settle for it. Alienated from his crass father and pious mother, 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 what he has been searching for all his life. In One of Ours Willa Cather explores the destiny of a grandchild of the pioneers, a young Nebraskan whose yearnings impel him toward a frontier bloodier and more distant than the one that vanished before his birth. In doing so, she creates a canny and extraordinarily vital portrait of an American psyche at once skeptical and romantic, restless and heroic.
About the discussion leader:
Suzanne Brown just retired after teaching for 35 years at Dartmouth College. She is a writer of short stories as well as a literary critic; her articles have appeared in Modern Fiction Studies and other journals, while her stories have been published in Southern Review, Yale Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Carolina Quarterly, Southwest Review, and other magazines. She was a Fulbright scholar to Germany and received an Individual Artist Fellowship from the NH Arts Council. From 2009-2011 she was the project scholar for a grant through the Maine Humanities Council to expand discussions of literature and medicine for staff in Veterans Hospitals nationwide and edited the literary anthology Echoes of War. She is currently facilitating book discussions with veterans in New Hampshire and Vermont.
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