Hamlin Garland - Complete Works of Hamlin Garland

The Complete Works of

HAMLIN GARLAND

(1860-1940)

Contents

Delphi Classics 2021

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The Complete Works of

HAMLIN GARLAND

By Delphi Classics, 2021

Complete Works of Hamlin Garland

First published in the United Kingdom in 2021 by Delphi Classics.

Delphi Classics, 2021.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form other than that in which it is published.

ISBN: 978 1 80170 010 8

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West Salem, a village in La Crosse County, Wisconsin Garlands birthplace

After his first literary success, Main-Travelled Roads a collection of short stories inspired by his boyhood days on a farm Garland continued to publish novels, short fiction and essays. In 1917, at the age of fifty-seven, he published the autobiography A Son of the Middle Border , which won immediate acclaim. Its success prompted a sequel, A Daughter of the Middle Border , for which the author won the 1922 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. After two more volumes in the series appeared, achieving much less praise, Garland began a second series of memoirs based on his diary.

A mellow work written in a mood of nostalgia, A Son of the Middle Border is now regarded as a classic of American realism. It describes Garlands family background and childhood as the son of pioneer farmers. The true coming-of-age story of a farm boy that experiences the numerous privations of a homesteaders life on the vast unbroken prairie continues to resonate with readers today. The autobiography recounts Garlands gradual journey from a rural childhood to the study of literature and the sciences in Boston, as well as his vital connections with such important figures as William Dean Howell. The text eventually analyses his reclaimed sense of identity as a writer of the Midwests beautiful yet hard land.

The first editions title page

Garland in his study, close to the time of first publishing his famous autobiography

JANUARY TWENTY-SECOND.

Dear Mrs. LeCron:

In the spring of 1898, after finishing my LIFE OF ULYSSES S. GRANT, I began to plan to go into the Klondike over the Telegraph Trail. One day in showing the maps of my route to William Dean Howells, I said, I shall go in here and come out there, a trail of nearly twelve hundred miles through an almost unknown country. As I uttered this I suddenly realized that I was starting on a path holding many perils and that I might not come back.

With this in mind, I began to dictate the story of my career up to that time. It was put in the third person but it was my story and the story of my people, the Garlands and the McClintocks. This manuscript, crude and hasty as it was, became the basis of A SON OF THE MIDDLE BORDER. It was the beginning of a four-volume autobiography which it has taken me fifteen years to write. As a typical mid-west settler I felt that the history of my family would be, in a sense, the chronicle of the era of settlement lying between 1840 and 1914. I designedly kept it intimate and personal, the joys and sorrows of a group of migrating families. Of the four books, Volume One, THE TRAIL MAKERS, is based upon my memory of the talk around a pioneer fireside. The other three volumes are as true as my own memory can make them.

Hamlin Garland