Hamlin Garland: A Life (review)

Thanks to Keith Newlin’s exhaustive and eloquently written biography, we now have access to the entirety of Hamlin Garland’s quirky, historically revealing life. Newlin contributes to the study of Garland in two noticeable ways: First, by extending the narrative into the modernist period, Newlin builds on Donald Pizer’s Hamlin Garland’s Early Work and Career (1969), which ends the story around the turn of the century; second, by drawing on a range of newly available documents, Newlin rounds out our understanding of Garland’s motivations and precarious place among the cultural elite. The result is a biography that will serve as a resource to Garland scholars and as a detailed portrait of artistic networks spanning the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century.

Newlin continually reminds us that while Garland was a great entrepreneur, relentless in selling stories and constructing a celebrity profile, he was by no means a natural-born writer. In order to establish himself, Garland grappled with a variety of internal and external factors, including his training in oratory, which tended to make his fiction didactic; his initial lack of contacts when he arrived in Boston in 1884; his guilt over leaving his family behind on the farm, especially his mother; his attraction to any number of reform causes; and a temperament that lent itself neither to painstaking preparation or revision of his writing. Yet as Newlin recounts, Garland carved out a place for himself through a combination of dogged networking, timely advocacy, and the use of his family’s experience as material.

Newlin’s biography is surprising. We learn, for instance, that Garland’s support of Henry George and his outrage over land speculation did not prevent him from perpetrating the same sin of speculation throughout his life. Much more flattering to Garland than the history of his relationship to land is the history of his networking with authors. Newlin includes a quote from Walt Whitman (transcribed by Horace Traubel) that aptly summarizes Garland’s approach: “Garland has guts” (112). His guts consist of his seeking out admired writers, his penchant for taking firm stands in literary and political matters, and his willingness to live with adversity. These guts win him support from many nineteenth-century custodians of culture, including Whitman, William Dean Howells, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Margaret Fuller, Theodore Roosevelt, and others; but those same qualities marginalize him later, when he takes the position of a priggish Victorian, uneasy with modernist attacks on convention.

Garland’s literary work does not fare particularly well here. Even some of the stories that survive in classrooms seem less demanding of a close read than the public life he led. Newlin is discriminating, pointing out which of Garland’s works indicate an achievement in craft, a potential to influence future readers, or a challenge to the norms of his time. Yet comparatively speaking, few works appear exceptional in this regard. One gets the impression that he wrote the majority of his stories and novels with little time allotted for intimate knowledge of his characters, that is to say, with the hastiness befitting a man most comfortable in public. Still, Garland’s literary contributions come alive less as texts in themselves and more as part of a fascinating life characterized by conviction and authorial self-creation.