Memorial Fictions offers a major reassessment of Willa Cather's career and artistic achievements, provides a plethora of information on popular culture during the Great War, and demonstrates the importance of literature as a cultural forum for addressing issues and ideas fundamental to American culture.Based on extensive archival research and a variety of scholarly sources drawn from several disciplines, Steven Trout shows how Willa Cather's analysis of the First World War in One of Ours and The Professor's House represents a considerable accomplishment, one worthy to stand next to her groundbreaking treatment of Nebraska settlers in O Pioneers! and My Ántonia and her virtual re-invention of the historical novel in Death Comes for the Archbishop and Shadows on the Rock. Furthermore, he argues that Cather's First World War-related fiction deserves wider consideration alongside such established classics as Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, and Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth.Though awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1923, One of Ours was a frequently maligned and misunderstood book. Contemporary male reviewers reviled the work and it has been her most neglected novel since. Trout not only re-evaluates the impact of the First World War on Cather's fiction but also demonstrates that One of Ours, far from representing a dubious achievement within the Cather canon, renders the American experience of the war with prophetic insight and considerable imaginative vigour. He also offers a detailed reappraisal of The Professor's House, showing it to be a novel haunted by the phantom-like presence of the Great War.Steven Trout is an associate professor of English at Fort Hays State University.

He is co-editor of Beyond Modern Memory: Literature of the Great War Reconsidered.