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Hamlin Garland - A Biography (Paperback)
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Hamlin Garland - A Biography (Paperback)
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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.
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