Hamlin Garland

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...

This 1892 novel tells of a young orphan girl growing up in the American West. Two kind bachelors take her in, but clear complications arise as a result of this unconventional family.

In 1895, Hamlin Garland, celebrated for his novels inspired by his Midwestern upbringing, traveled west, taking notes on the cowboys, Indians, and mountain scenery he encountered. He turned this material into an adventure story dramatizing the conflict between ranchers and conservationists in the rugged American west.

In this gripping story of love and sacrifice, it's love at first sight for Bertie — a married woman — and Ben. Bertie's husband suffers from a weak heart, while Ben's fiancée is dying of consumption. Facing the inevitable, Ben's fiancée conspires with Bertie's husband, hatching a plan that leaves Bertie and Ben free to marry.

Hamlin Garland followed up his collection of short stories titled Main-Travelled Roads with Other Main-Travelled Roads. Unsparing in their depiction of the harsh realities of Midwestern farm life, these stories are quintessential examples of Garland's writing. Stories include, "William Bacon's Man," "A Fair Exile," and "A Preacher's Love Story."

A literary success when it was published in 1902, Captain of the Gray-Horse Troop follows the trials of Captain George Curtis at the Indian Agency at Pine Ridge. In this engrossing novel, Hamlin creates a romantic adventure story about the unjust treatment of the American Indian by cattlemen, drawing on his experiences visiting American Indian reservations.

This 1911 novel features a spiritual medium who sacrifices to make a better life for her son, while keeping him ignorant of her profession. When she is the subject of a lawsuit in which she must prove her claims, her manifestations of supernatural power win her skeptical son over . . . though at a tragic price.

Hesper, from the Pulitzer Prize—winning writer Hamlin Garland, is somewhat of a departure for the acclaimed author of novels and short stories about the hardships of life on a frontier farm. A western romance, Hesper looks at labor in Colorado, reflecting Garland's interest in social issues.

"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.

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...