Garland in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates ed. by Keith Newlin

In the late nineteenth century, despite being an overwhelmingly agrarian nation up to that point, the United States did not have a strong tradition of rural or farm literature. As Willa Cather once said, for American writing the “drawing room” remained the “proper setting.” Perhaps more than any other person, Hamlin Garland, who grew up on farms in Iowa and South Dakota, changed this. He added the phrase “Middle Border,” a clever description for the movement of agricultural settlement across the American Midwest, to the literary lexicon. Garland, as Vernon Parrington noted, saw that the “Middle Border had no spokesman at the court of letters,” and so he stepped in to fill the void.

Keith Newlin offered a vivid account of Garland’s personal story in Hamlin Garland: A Life (2008). Now, in Garland in His Own Time, he offers a thorough book of commentaries about Garland written by Garland’s contemporaries. The importance of Garland’s career and Newlin’s great accomplishments in chronicling his life are not to be underestimated. Although he is largely forgotten today, Garland was at the center of American literary life in his time and served as a strong advocate of the Midwest finding its own voice, one less dependent on the East and Europe. In the end, Garland produced forty-seven books and hundreds of magazine articles. In both Hamlin Garland and Garland in His Own Time, Newlin has brilliantly captured Garland’s significance.

When Garland began to make his way in the world of American letters in Boston, he left his mark by emphasizing the strains of farm life in once well known books such as Main-Travelled Roads (1891). Some mid-westerners thought Garland was catering too much to eastern prejudices in such works. Cather, for example, was critical of “all that sort of rot which Mr. Hamlin Garland and his school have seen fit to write about our peaceable and rather inoffensive country.” Newlin also includes in Garland in His Own Time an account of the writer’s early life in Dakota Territory, revealing that the Garland family was actually quite well off. It is the choice of such accounts that makes Newlin’s new compendium a crucial source for those seeking to contextualize Garland’s works.

After the turn of the century, Garland turned to other forms of writing, including novels about the farther American West, which helped him make money but cost him critical support. Later, he wrote a great deal about his own life, including A Son of the Middle Border (1917), which was more positive about prairie life and, arguably, more of a contribution to American literary realism. Garland also adhered to an older sense of decorum and resisted the “pornography” and publicity-driven themes he found in the works of modernist and “revolt from the village” writers. Newlin’s thoughtfully selected commentaries will help a new generation of readers understand these turns in Garland’s career and how he was ultimately pushed to the margins of American literary life and deemed, as one of Newlin’s commentators notes, a “no longer significant has-been.”