Then We’ll Jump: Hamlin Garland’s Prodigal Private and the Great Banquet of Joy

Rooted in a central way that these post-1865 Americans understood themselves, Garland uses the discourse of evangelical Protestantism to first confront the inequities that threatened to overwhelm Smith and his family. Through confronting those inequities, however, Garland uses that same discourse, secondly, to express an alternate form of American possibility.