Hamlin Garland: A Life (review)

Keith Newlin's thoroughly researched and admirably written biography is welcome for several reasons. For one, it fills a large void in American studies, for Garland—undoubtedly a key figure in American realism-naturalism, as a practitioner, theorist, and recorder—has been shamefully neglected for altogether too long. The last full biography, by Jean Holloway, is a half-century old (aside from a short 1978 biography in the Twayne series), and it contains many gaps and odd judgments. Donald Pizer's admirable 1960 study had remained the most reliable guide to Garland's career, though it stopped before Garland turned forty. Many of the most pivotal moments in Garland's life, especially the turn to perhaps his most successful genre, personal and family autobiography, had been virtually untouched and uninterpreted until this crucial book.

And not only has Newlin filled in gaps and rounded out the story, he has brought his practiced eye—as the author of several important articles on Garland, the editor of some of his key works, and co-editor of an important and comprehensive collection of his letters—to all corners of Garland's work. Indeed, what is perhaps most impressive about this book is how Newlin makes the elements of Garland's life that cause even his strongest fans to wince—his immersion in psychic research, his endless cataloguing of every lunch shared with every third-rate writer, his clubbing with the rich and connected, his distaste for much of modern American life and writing—both understandable and even compelling.

Ultimately, Newlin lays stress on what remains Garland's most enduring contribution: those great "revelatory works of realism," as Sinclair Lewis put it during his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, that inspired a generation of groundbreaking twentieth-century American writers, including Dreiser, Cather, and Lewis himself. Those began with Main-Travelled Roads, but are also found in his less-well known collections, and arguably capped by Rose of Dutcher's Coolly, a novel that has still not received its due. Equally under-appreciated are his stark autobiographical works, especially A Son of the Middle Border and A Daughter of the Middle Border, that are crucial to any true understanding of Garland's achievement as well as of America's massive western settlement process, in all its triumphs and tragedies. Newlin's account of how Garland finally found an editor to take a chance on Son (Mark Sullivan at Collier's) after years of revision and rejection, when his career seemed over, is told with impressive skill and feeling. Newlin writes that "for three years, Garland had been revising his story. Six editors—all of whom were friends—had rejected the manuscript, their rebuff also indicating to Garland that his life, . . . [and] all his struggle and achievement, were not worth the reading." But "Sullivan's acceptance put wind back in his sails."

To relate these crucial episodes and make sense of a man whose writings and life defy easy classification, Newlin has (like his subject) travelled indefatigably across the land. And while Garland struck out in his search for gold in the Klondike and for mystical buried crosses in southern California, Newlin has, to the vast benefit of American studies, struck pay dirt.