Cather) was born and raised on the farm that adjoined her own family's, and she combined parts of her own personality with Grosvenor's in the character of Claude.

But he was in my mind so much that I couldn't get through him to other things ... some of me was buried with him in France, and some of him was left alive in me.He was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross and a Silver Star citation for bravery under fire, of which Cather wrote:[1] That anything so glorious could have happened to anyone so disinherited of hope.

She interviewed veterans and wounded soldiers in hospitals, focusing especially on the experience of rural Nebraskans she profiled in a magazine article, "Roll Call on the Prairie".

When Enid departs for China to care for her missionary sister, who has suddenly fallen ill, Claude moves back to his family's farm.

Finally believing he has found a purpose in life - beyond the drudgery of farming and marriage - Claude revels in his freedom and new responsibilities.

His pursuit of vague notions of purpose and principle culminates in a ferocious front-line encounter with an overwhelming German onslaught.

Sinclair Lewis praised the Nebraska portion of the work—"truth does guide the first part of the book"—but wrote that in the second half Cather had produced a "romance of violinists gallantly turned soldiers, of self-sacrificing sergeants, sallies at midnight, and all the commonplaces of ordinary war novels".

[3] H. L. Mencken, who had praised her earlier work, wrote that in depicting the war Cather's effort "drops precipitately to the level of a serial in The Lady's Home Journal...fought out not in France, but on a Hollywood movie-lot.

"[3] Ernest Hemingway thought it overrated despite its sales and in a letter to Edmund Wilson made an observation that a later critic has called "blatantly chauvinistic": "Wasn't that last scene in the [battle] lines wonderful?

[5] Cather, writes one critic, "committed heresy by appearing to argue that the First World War had actually been an inspiring, even liberating experience for some of its combatants.