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

Introduction

[xi] X Introduction one week before his death on 4 March 1940, Hamlin Garland paused to reflect on his life’s accomplishments in a diary entry he titled “Summing up my life”: A long rainy day alone [in] the house gave me time for reflection and a summing up of my life and its achievements which are becoming more and more pitiful as my own vitality ebbs and I have no further hope of accomplishment. I marvel that so much honor is granted me. As a man dying on his feet I have lost all pride in my books and all expectation of further reward.1 For years his depression had been growing as each day brought evidence of new physical infirmities and reminders that current fiction and literary fashion had edged out interest in his books. To newspaperman Floyd Logan he wrote on 5 February 1934, “Your very frank good letter is on my desk and I feel that I must acknowledge it while its glow is still with me. It reminds me of the first time Howells spoke to me of his waning fame. ‘I have outlived my vogue’ he said and it was a sad moment for me. He had a vogue, I have never enjoyed a boom much less a vogue, but I am in the midst of finding out that I am an old fellow of seventy four and that people are no longer interested in what I say or do or write.”2 In the 1930s Garland may have seemed to his younger contemporaries as “an attractive and lovable but no longer significant has-been,” as Hermann Hagedorn* remarked, but in the heyday of his career Garland had a considerable reputation as a radi- garland in his own time [xii] cal writer of realistic stories and polemical essays agitating for a literature that accurately represented American life. Born in a squatter’s cabin in the village of West Salem, Wisconsin, on 14 September 1860, Garland was raised in impoverished surroundings as his father struggled to wrest a living from a series of frontier farms. By the time he was ten, young Hamlin had moved four times, eventually settling on a 160-acre farm of unplowed prairie in Mitchell County, Iowa, near the town of Osage, where he would set many of his most effective stories. As the oldest of four children, Hamlin drove a heavy, sod-breaking plow, turning some seventy acres of prairie during his tenth year—hard, brutal labor that would mark him forever. When he was sixteen, he entered the Cedar Valley Seminary in Osage, a combination high school and junior college, returning to the farm for the planting and harvesting seasons. When he graduated in 1881 at age twenty-one, he was determined to leave farm life forever, and in 1884, after a brief stint at homesteading in the Dakota Territory, he made his way to Boston. Like many youths of twenty-four, he didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life. For a time, he dreamed of becoming a great orator, and later, a playwright and actor. After he had drifted into what was effectively an adjunct position as a lecturer at the Boston School of Oratory, he tried his hand at fiction writing and discovered his calling. Garland was an ambitious and industrious youth, and soon he began to flood the newspapers and magazines with reviews, poetry, and essays, even as he wrote to the leading writers of the day to test his judgments as he prepared his lectures. (At this point, fiction was still a vague ambition.) A naturally gregarious man with a gift for friendship, before long he made the acquaintance of many of Boston’s writers and intellectuals. His years on the farm had made him deeply sympathetic to the often-arduous life of the working farmer, and his acquaintance with Boston’s literati underscored the comparative cultural deprivation of the Midwest. He therefore seized upon Henry George’s single tax as a remedy, for he believed that a more equitable system of taxation would lead to economic prosperity and a more rewarding cultural life. He became an enthusiastic and vocal lecturer on the single tax and wrote a number of stories combining George’s economic theories with realistic depictions of farm life. When the best of these stories appeared as Main-Travelled Roads in 1891, reviewers praised his method but were disturbed by the bleak subject. “His pictures and incidents of...