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A Daughter of the Middle Border

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First published: 1921
Pages: 328

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About this book

Hamlin Garland resumed his own story in 1921, four years after A Son of the Middle Border, opening in the Chicago studios where he had fallen in with a circle of artists and writers. There he met Zulime Taft, a painter and the sculptor Lorado Taft's sister. She married him in 1899 and came to the West Salem farmhouse as the daughter his mother had long wished for. Around that marriage Garland sets his Western years: research for a life of Grant, buffalo country, Standing Rock, the Oklahoma prairie. The first half closes on his mother's empty room. The rest belongs to the old house, where two daughters are born, fire strikes, and his father at last goes. It won the 1922 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, and it watches the pioneer generation close out without prettifying it.

About the author

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.