It is the night before Christmas at Portsborough, New York. The snow blankets the grounds, the shining lights placed with great care, hang from the trees and the smell of chestnuts roasting permeates the air. Although the city is ready for Christmas, the people who are finding themselves in Trinity Church are not there to celebrate the birth of their Savoir. No tonight, they find themselves confessing sins they meant to keep hidden from the world.

Edward Everett Hale is remembered by millions as the author of The Man Without a Country. This popular and gifted nineteenth-century writer was an outstanding and prolific contributor to the fields of journalism, fiction, essay, and history. He wrote more than 150 books and pamphlets (one novel sold more than a million copies in his lifetime) and was intimately associated with the publication of many of the early American journals, among them the North American Review, Atlantic Monthly, and Christian Examiner. He served as editor of Old and New and was a frequent contributor to the foremost newspapers and periodicals of his time. Yet the writings of this "journalist with a touch of genius" were only incidental to Hale's Christian ministry in New England and in Washington, D.C., where he was for five years Chaplain of the Senate. His literary creed reflected that of his ministry, for Hale's interpretation of the social gospel comprised an active concern with all phases of human affairs. Confidant of poets and editors, friend to diplomats and statesmen, Hale helped mold public opinions in economics, sociology, history, and politics through three-quarters of what he called "a most extraordinary century in history." In recounting Hale's life and times, Holloway vividly portrays this fascinating and often turbulent era.

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.