Hamlin Garland: A Life

Acknowledgments

ix 79ADEMB;:=C;DJI All biographies are written with the help of others, and I am pleased to acknowledge the aid of two people who were instrumental in the composition of this book. Garland’s granddaughter Victoria DoyleJones (daughter of Constance) granted permission to quote from his papers and from her aunt Mary Isabel’s unpublished memoir of her father, which revealed many heretofore unknown details of Garland’s life. I am grateful for her hospitality in opening to me not only her home but also her aunt’s trunk, which contains a number of family papers and photographs that proved instrumental in my reconstruction of Garland’s life. My dedication expresses my debt to John Ahouse, who until his retirement in 2005 was the curator of the Hamlin Garland Papers at the Edward L. Doheny Memorial Library of the University of Southern California. Over the course of nearly ten years, John graciously shared his considerable knowledge of Garland while also being unfailingly courteous and prompt in responding to queries and requests for photocopies. Just as important were his occasional proddings to reconsider the effect of some detail in the larger context of Garland’s life, and his careful reading of the manuscript, which saved me from some embarrassing errors. I am especially grateful to six other scholars who wrested time from their own projects to read and astutely comment on drafts of this book: Gary Culbert, Philip Furia, Jerome Loving, Kurtis Meyer, Joseph B. McCullough, and Donald Pizer. For responses to queries and other assistance, I wish to thank William “Gene” Aisenbrey, Suzanne Bloomfield, Donna Campbell, Bill Ferraro, Robert Fleming, Keith Gumery, Charles Johanningsmeier, Errol Kindschy, Monte Kloberdanz, James Nagel, Constance Harper Nelson, Jennifer x acknowledgments Raspet, Roger W. Smith, Paul Sorrentino, and Stanley Wertheim. For help in acquiring the photographs for this volume, I am grateful to Gary Culbert, Victoria Doyle-Jones, Matthew S. S. Johnson, Jon Morris, Michael Ward, the West Salem Historical Society, and Claude Zachary. For her remarkable patience and able assistance, I thank Sophie Williams, interlibrary loan librarian extraordinaire of Randall Library, University of North Carolina Wilmington (uncw). I also thank my department chair, Christopher Gould, who has enthusiastically supported this project from the beginning. Every writer of biography builds on the work of others, and my notes will indicate how frequently I have drawn on Donald Pizer’s Hamlin Garland’s Early Work and Career (1960), still the benchmark for studies of the writer’s formative influences. Jean Holloway’s Hamlin Garland: A Biography (1960) and Joseph B. McCullough’s Hamlin Garland (1978) provide useful surveys of the writer’s life, and the essays collected in Critical Essays on Hamlin Garland (1982, ed. James Nagel) and The Critical Reception of Hamlin Garland (1985, ed. Charles L. P. Silet, Robert E. Welch, and Richard Boudreau) gather the most important studies of Garland’s writings. My many debts to other scholars are acknowledged in the notes. Garland’s voluminous letters, manuscripts, and especially his diaries are the chief sources for details of his personal life. After the success of A Son of the Middle Border (1917), Garland realized that his daily diary, which he had begun keeping on January 1, 1898, could provide the source material for later installments of his family history , and so be began transcribing it for use in his memoirs. With rare honesty, he resisted the opportunity to rewrite his personal history, believing that any autobiography should recall his defeats as well as his triumphs, and his transcriptions are typically accurate in substance though revised to polish style. But since memoirs are inevitably selective, I have tended to quote from them only to register the emotional truth of a moment and have instead relied upon the diaries themselves for first impressions and the details of his remarkably varied life. I am grateful to the Huntington Library for permission to quote from them and from other correspondence held in its collection. acknowledgments xi This biography had its genesis in the Selected Letters of Hamlin Garland (1998), which I coedited with Joseph B. McCullough, and I am grateful to the many archives that opened their collections in the preparation of that volume. For their assistance during a second round of visits for the preparation of this book, I again take pleasure in thanking the archivists at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York City; Archives of the...