Hamlin Garland

This sequel to Garland's acclaimed autobiography, A Son of the Middle Border, continues his story as he sets out for Chicago and settles into a Bohemian encampment of artists and writers. There he meets Zulime Taft, an artist who captures his heart and eventually becomes his wife. The intensity of this romance is rivaled only by Garland's struggle between America's coastal elite and his heartland roots. A Daughter of the Middle Border won the Pulitzer...

Main-Travelled Roads collects 11 short stories, originally published in 1891, set in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota, or what Hamlin Garland called the “Middle Border.†Depicting an agrarian life of exploitation, misogyny, and poverty, Garland's radical, realist stories refute romantic conceptions of the rural Midwest. Unrelenting yet strangely hopeful in its view of how things ought to be, this collection is gripping, hard-hitting, and surprisingly...

In this 1904 novel, Garland sets aside his usual Midwestern themes for a tale of the theater in which the hero-a pioneering playwright-is captivated by a talented yet wild-spirited leading lady.

Here is the story of Black Mose, who exemplifies the courageous, self-reliant cowboy who heads to the mountains to escape a confining and guilt-ridden past for freedom in the untamed west. Garland based this engrossing Western on the lives of his playmates in Iowa, many of whom hoped to run away to become scouts or cowboys.

Hamlin Garland's enormously popular novels about the West represented a change in locale and writing style from his novels and short stories about life on a Midwestern farm. In The Spirit of Sweetwater, a mining adventure and tale of love set in Colorado, his dynamic characters exemplify the rugged individuals typically found out West.

In this 1908 volume, Garland explores psychic and supernatural phenomena. Giving accounts of his personal psychic investigations-the author writes them in a fiction-like tone, keeping himself as a main character. "Mr. Garland writes with a fine and doubtless sincere attempt at impartiality and open-mindedness," said the New York Times in its review.

"Early in the gray and red dawn of a March morning in 1883, two wagons moved slowly out of Boomtown, the two-year-old 'giant of the plains.'" Garland opens his description of a town in the Wild West and the people newly come to live there.