Hamlin Garland

"A Son of the Middle Border" is a coming-of-age story of a farm boy. In this captivating autobiography of Pulitzer Prize–winner Hamlin Garland, he described his family background and childhood as the son of pioneer farmers. He narrates his journey from a rural childhood to studying literature and the sciences in Boston and his reclaimed sense of identity as a writer of the Midwest's beautiful yet challenging land.

Hamlin Garland, a Pulitzer Prize-winner and author of more than forty books, was a central figure in American literary life for half a century. He was intimately involved with many of the major literary, social, and artistic movements in American culture, and his extensive correspondence with the intellectual leaders of American culture was almost unparalleled in scope. This volume brings together a rich, representative sample of Garland?s letters. They are addressed to an impressive roster of individuals: Samuel Clemens, William Dean Howells, Walt Whitman, Zona Gale, Theodore Roosevelt, Van Wyck Brooks, Howard Mumford Jones, Brander Matthews, Stephen Crane, George Washington Cable, and many others. The letters touch on an equally broad range of subjects, from the U.S. government?s reprehensible treatment of Native Americans to environmental issues to the major literary figures and controversies of Garland?s day. Frank, opinionated, and wide-ranging, Garland?s letters provide a valuable and entertaining portrait of American cultural and intellectual life in the years between 1890 and 1940.

As a self-proclaimed native "son of the middle border" states of Wisconsin, Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota, and South Dakota, Hamlin Garland wrote short stories, novels, and essays about the harsh realities of farm life. At a time when rural romanticism was in literary vogue, he described conditions for midwestern farmers as they really were and promoted a wide variety of reforms to improve their lives, including women's rights legislation and single-tax reform. The volume reprints much of Garland's radical fiction and nonfiction from between 1887 and 1894, including four of his most outspoken stories depicting farm conditions of the time. Fueled by moral outrage and a cry for justice shaped by his own family's hardships in Wisconsin, Iowa, and South Dakota, the radical writing of his early career is filled with compassion and fury.

In recognition of his achievements in literature, Hamlin Garland (1860?1940) received four honorary doctorates and a Pulitzer Prize. Keith Newlin traces the rise of this prairie farm boy with a half-formed ambition to write who then skyrocketed into international prominence before he was forty. His life is a story of ironic contradictions: the radical whose early achievement thrust him to the forefront of literary innovation but whose evolutionary aesthetic principles could not themselves adapt to changing conditions; the self-styled ?veritist? whose credo demanded that he verify every fact but whose credulity led him to spend a lifetime seeking to confirm the existence of spirits. His need for recognition caused him to cultivate rewarding friendships with the leaders of literary culture, yet even when he attained that recognition, it was never enough, and his self-doubt caused him fits of black despair. ø The first and only other biography of Hamlin Garland was published more than forty years ago; since then, letters, manuscripts, and family memoirs have surfaced to provide, along with changing literary scholarship, a more evaluative and critical interpretation of Garland?s life and times. Hamlin Garland: A Life is an exploration of Garland?s contributions to American literary culture and places his work within the artistic context of its time.

"In these and other stories written from 1890-1905, Hamlin Garland sought to capture his vision of the spirit of the Native American Indian in transition. Based on ten years of visits to reservations in the American West, these stories are of interest for readers today in part because they illustrate a sincere and well-intentioned white reformer coming to understand a culture radically at odds with his own - and discovering in the process that his own culture is less "advanced" than he had supposed." "This edition reprints the text and illustrations from the 1923 printing as well as two of Garland's essays indicting the treatment of Indians. An introduction places the stories in the historical context of Garland's life and times."--BOOK JACKET.

Hamlin Garland’s Main-Travelled Roads is recognized as one of the early landmarks of American literary realism. But Garland’s shift in mid-career from the harsh verisimilitude of Prairie Folks and Prairie Songs to a romanticizing of the Far West, and from ardent espousal of the principles of “veritism” to violent denunciations of naturalism, is a paradox which has long puzzled literary historians. In tracing the evolution of Garland’s work, the various reactions of his stories under the influence of editorial comment and of contemporary critical reaction, Jean Holloway suggests that the Garland apostasy was an illusion produced by his very intellectual immobility amidst the swirling currents of American thought. His extensive correspondence with Gilder of the Century, Alden of Harper’s Monthly, McClure of McClure’s, and Bok of the Ladies’ Home Journal is adduced in support of the thesis that the writer’s choices of subject and of treatment were psychologically forced rather than conditioned primarily by literary theory. As a subject for biography, however, Garland has an appeal far beyond the scope of his literary influence. The friendships of this gregarious peripatetic with the famous began with Howells, Twain, Whitman, and Stephen Crane, stretched down the years to include such younger men as Bret Harte and Carl Van Doren, and crossed the seas to embrace such British literary lions as Barrie, Shaw, and Kipling. Garland’s fervent espousal of “causes”—the Single Tax Movement, psychic experimentation, Indian rights-brought him into close contact with other prominent men—Henry George, Theodore Roosevelt, and William Jennings Bryan. These public figures form the incidental characters in Garland’s spate of autobiographical works. Yet it is the central figure of his own story which has become permanently identified with the “Middle Border,” that region “between the land of the hunter and the harvester” which Augustus Thomas defined as “wherever Hamlin Garland is.” In A Son of the Middle Border Garland nostalgically recreated his boyhood on the frontier and, regardless of the detractions of literary critics, preserved for posterity an important segment of American social history.

‘The Significant Hamlin Garland’ collects the best of Donald Pizer’s essays dealing with Garland’s early work and activities in an effort to re-establish the importance of this formative stage in his career. The essays in the first part of the book are devoted to Garland’s radical economic and artistic beliefs and activities, while those in the second half concentrate on his most permanent work of the period: ‘Main-Travelled Roads’, his novel ‘Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly’, and his autobiography ‘A Son of the Middle Border’.