The battle of the sexes reached a near fever pitch in the early years of the twentieth century, in the debate over the "proper" role of women in a rapidly changing and increasingly industrialized society. The six plays that Keith Newlin has selected for this book nicely illustrate the conflicts of that time over such issues as the double standard, the advent of the "New Woman" and turn-of-the-century feminism, and the clash between a woman's career and conventional marriage. The plays are: William Vaughn Moody's The Great Divide (1906), Rachel Crothers's A Man's World (1910), Augustus Thomas's As a Man Thinks (1911), Alice Gerstenberg's Overtones (1913), Susan Glaspell's The Outside (1917), and the first winner of the Pulitzer Prize for drama, Jesse Lynch Williams's Why Marry? (1917). Both commercial and experimental plays are represented here, including two one-acts, and ranging from symbolic drama to zesty comedy. The point, as Mr. Newlin notes in his introduction, is not to recover significant plays but to illustrate a vibrant social debate from both male and female perspectives, and to do so in a range of dramatic form.

In his heyday, Hamlin Garland had a considerable reputation as a radical writer whose realistic stories and polemical essays agitating for a literature that accurately represented American life riled the nation's press. Born in poverty and raised on a series of frontier farms, Garland fled the rural Midwest in 1881 at age twenty-one. When his stories combining the radical economic theories of Henry George with realistic depictions of farm life appeared as Main-Travelled Roads in 1891, reviewers praised his method but were disturbed by the bleak subject matter. Four years (and eight books) later, his frank depiction of sexuality in his novel of the New Woman, Rose of Dutcher's Coolly (1895), made Garland even more controversial. After realising he couldn't make a living from such realistic works, Garland turned first to biography, then to critically panned but commercially popular romances set in the mountain west, and eventually to autobiography. In 1917 he published A Son of the Middle Border, a remarkable autobiography in which he combined the story of his life to 1893 with the story of U.S. westward expansion, to considerable critical acclaim and large sales. Its 1921 sequel, A Daughter of the Middle Border, received the Pulitzer Prize for biography. Although the author eventually wrote no fewer than eight autobiographies, he showed little awareness of the effect of his strong personality upon others. The sixty-six reminiscences in Garland in His Own Time offer an essential complement to his self-portrait by giving the perspectives of family, friends, fellow writers, and critics. The book offers the contemporary reader new reasons to return to this fascinating writer's work.

In "A Summer to Be," Isabel Garland Lord writes an honest and revealing memoir of growing up in the shadow of her famous father, the pioneering realist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Hamlin Garland. Lord unveils a hitherto unknown side of her father--the intensely loving, domineering patriarch whose deep love for his eldest daughter led him to change the trajectory of his career even as that love impeded his daughter's own independence. Written in the 1960s, "A Summer to Be" movingly weaves the story of Lord's own coming of age that is also a snapshot of American literary culture during the first decades of the twentieth century. Part memoir and part autobiography, "A Summer to Be" records a daughter's gradual emergence from her devoted and possessive father; it is a story full of moments of revelation and intrigue, betrayal and guilt, and ultimately the joy of self-discovery.

In recognition of his achievements in literature, Hamlin Garland (1860-1940) received four honorary doctorates and a Pulitzer Prize. Keith Newlin traces the rise of this prairie farm boy with a half-formed ambition to write who then skyrocketed into international prominence before he was forty. His life is a story of ironic contradictions: the radical whose early achievement thrust him to the forefront of literary innovation but whose evolutionary aesthetic principles could not themselves adapt to changing conditions; the self-styled "veritist" whose credo demanded that he verify every fact but whose credulity led him to spend a lifetime seeking to confirm the existence of spirits. His need for recognition caused him to cultivate rewarding friendships with the leaders of literary culture, yet even when he attained that recognition, it was never enough, and his self-doubt caused him fits of black despair. The first and only other biography of Hamlin Garland was published more than forty years ago; since then, letters, manuscripts, and family memoirs have surfaced to provide, along with changing literary scholarship, a more evaluative and critical interpretation of Garland's life and times." Hamlin Garland: A Life" is an exploration of Garland's contributions to American literary culture and places his work within the artistic context of its time.

For a century, Theodore Dreiser has represented for many readers a rebellious modernism whose novels both critiqued the American dream and embodied a bleakly deterministic perception of life. His first novel, Sister Carrie (1900), was reluctantly published and then ignored by its publisher, who thought the book immoral. Another publisher withdrew his fifth novel, The "Genius" (1915), rather than face prosecution on obscenity charges. Dreiser did not enjoy widespread popularity and critical acclaim until his masterpiece, An American Tragedy, appeared in 1925. This reference is an authoritative guide to his life and works. Included are several hundred entries on each of Dreiser's books and short stories, as well as magazine and newspaper pieces he collected during his life. Noteworthy uncollected and posthumously collected works are given separate entries, as are major characters in the novels, family members, friends, and other persons important to understanding his writings. There are also entries on Dreiser's publishers, his major influences, the places and events important to his life, and the literary and social contexts of his works. Expert contributors wrote each of the entries, many of which cite works for further reading. The volume closes with a selected bibliography of works by and about Dreiser.

Hamlin Garland, a Pulitzer Prize-winner and author of more than forty books, was a central figure in American literary life for half a century. He was intimately involved with many of the major literary, social, and artistic movements in American culture, and his extensive correspondence with the intellectual leaders of American culture was almost unparalleled in scope.

This volume brings together a rich, representative sample of Garland's letters. They are addressed to an impressive roster of individuals: Samuel Clemens, William Dean Howells, Walt Whitman, Zona Gale, Theodore Roosevelt, Van Wyck Brooks, Howard Mumford Jones, Brander Matthews, Stephen Crane, George Washington Cable, and many others. The letters touch on an equally broad range of subjects, from the U.S. government's reprehensible treatment of Native Americans to environmental issues to the major literary figures and controversies of Garland's day.

Frank, opinionated, and wide-ranging, Garland's letters provide a valuable and entertaining portrait of American cultural and intellectual life in the years between 1890 and 1940.

Widely regarded as the best of Hamlin Garland's novels, "Rose of Dutcher's Coolly" tells the story of a country girl of precocious ability who is raised by her widower father on a small Wisconsin farm. She wants to be a poet and eventually attends the university, where her talent is encouraged. A carefully crafted defense of the New Woman, the first generation of women to achieve economic and social independence, "Rose of Dutcher's Coolly" deals with issues that are still with us--the nature of femininity, the problem of reconciling career and family, the meaning of "love," and the need for equal opportunity. Above all, it records a nineteenth-century man's vision of a world that still eludes us, one in which men and women are equal partners. This edition reprints the text of the 1895 printing and includes an introduction that places the novel in the historical context of the early feminist movement.

A Hopi child is torn from his parents and sent off to boarding school; white settlers encroach on the Cheyenne reservation, and the Cheyenne vow to fight to the death rather than give up their land; Howling Wolf witnesses the brutal murder of his brother and, when he protests, is in turn brutalized; after Sitting Bull's triumph over Custer's forces, he vows to fight to the death rather than submit to the white invaders. In these and other stories written from 1890-1905, Hamlin Garland sought to capture his vision of the spirit of the Native American Indian in transition. Based on ten years of visits to reservations in the American West, these stories are of interest for readers today in part because they illustrate a sincere and well-intentioned white reformer coming to understand a culture radically at odds with his own--and discovering in the process that his own culture is less "advanced" than he had supposed.