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".
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." The novel won Cather a larger readership than her earlier work, though the critical reception was not as positive. The novel has been compared unfavorably to other novels of World War I, like
Three Soldiers by
John Dos Passos, written from a disillusioned and anti-war point of view. Cather's protagonist, by contrast, escapes from an unhappy marriage and his purposeless life in Nebraska and finds his life's purpose in his wartime service and military comradeship, especially the friendship of David Gerhardt, a violinist. 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." ==References==