Claude Wheeler, the sensitive, aspiring protagonist of this novel, resembles the youngest son of a peculiarly American fairy tale. His fotune 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 this Pulitzer Prize-winning narrative, Cather creates a canny and extraordinarily vital portrait of an American psyche at once skeptical and romantic, restless and heroic.