A Daughter of the Middle Border

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.