Son of the Middle Border

"The realist . . . is really an optimist, a dreamer. He sees life in terms of what it might be, as well as in terms of what it is; but he writes of what is, and, at his best, suggests what is to be, by contrast." – Hamlin Garland

Born on a Wisconsin farm in September 1860 to devotees of the new Republican Party, Garland was named Hannibal Hamlin after Abraham Lincoln’s vice presidential running mate.    But he never much liked the name Hannibal and went by Hamlin most of his life, particularly after his writing career took off.   

                     Novelist, poet, essayist, short story writer, Garland is best known for his fiction involving hard-working Midwestern farmers – a reflection of his “Growing Up Days” in Wisconsin, Iowa and South Dakota.  His first major success, in fact, was a book of short stories Main-Travelled Roads, inspired by his days on the farm. He then serialized a biography of Ulysses S. Grant in McClure's Magazine, publishing it as a book in 1898, the same year he traveled to the Yukon to witness the Klondike Gold Rush and inspiring his best-seller The Trail of the Gold Seekers. 

While he was a prolific writer in many genres, his work as a memoirist brought him his most acclaim, beginning with his autobiography A Son of the Middle Border, its Pulitzer Prize-winning sequel A Daughter of the Middle Border, and a number of other memoirs about farm life, the people, and the harsh land they strove to tame – “...the hard, unromantic truth," he said, "of pioneer life on the plains.”

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