Hamlin Garland

A boyhood on farms in Wisconsin, Iowa and Dakota Territory gave Hamlin Garland the material he worked for fifty years. Born in 1860 near West Salem, Wisconsin, he left for Boston in 1884, read Henry George in the public library, and turned single-tax anger into fiction that refused to make prairie farming look picturesque. Main-Travelled Roads, the 1891 story collection, made his name and is the book still read. Under the Wheel, a play printed in 1890, argues the same case in dialogue and was later rebuilt as the novel Jason Edwards. He called his method veritism. Rose of Dutcher's Coolly followed in 1895, then The Captain of the Gray Horse Troop in 1902, drawn from his travels among Native peoples of the plains, and two forest service novels, Cavanagh, Forest Ranger and The Forester's Daughter. The Shadow World records a long investigation of mediums and seances that he kept up until his death in 1940. The memoirs paid best: A Daughter of the Middle Border won the 1922 Pulitzer Prize for biography. His commemorative tribute to the Indiana poet James Whitcomb Riley was issued by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which had elected him in 1918.