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...

A classic of American realism, A Son of the Middle Border (1917) is the true coming-of-age odyssey of a farm boy who-informed by the full brute force of a homesteaders' life on the vast unbroken prairie-would become a preeminent American writer of the early twentieth century. Pulitzer Prize winner Hamlin Garland's captivating autobiography recounts his journey from a rural childhood to the study of literature and the sciences in Boston, his vital...

When the short story collection Main-Travelled Roads was published 1891, reviewers praised its realism but were disturbed by its bleak subject-the pathos and struggles of hardworking Midwestern farmers. While Garland's stories depict the hard, unromantic truth of life on the plains, he also portrays exhilarating moments and the strength of individual will.