Novelist Hamlin Garland was born in West Salem, Wisconsin, on September 14, 1860. His father was an itinerant farmer who kept moving the family westward, to Iowa and to the wild and sparsely settled Dakota Territory (now comprising the states of North Dakota and South Dakota). Garland received little formal schooling and for the most part educated himself. In 1884, at 24 years of age, he moved to Boston, Massachusetts, to pursue a career as a writer. In 1891 he published a collection of his short stories and sketches, called "Main-Traveled Roads", and followed that with a pair of novels, "Prairie Folks" (1893) and "Wayside Courtships" (1897). His novels reflected the dire poverty of his childhood growing up on the western frontier, and his characters were not the sort of hardy individualists who persevered against all odds that the public believed populated the frontier; Hamlin saw little of those kinds of people growing up, and his novels detailed the poverty and despair of the frontier that he knew. The public wasn't ready to accept that portrayal of their beloved "west", and his novels weren't successful.

In 1893 Garland moved to Chicago and became a proponent of the "veritism" school of literature, which stressed realism in writing rather than the somewhat saccharine romanticism of much of popular literature of the time. In 1917 he wrote the autobiographical "A Son of the Middle Border", which was a critical and financial success and spawned several sequels. In addition to novels, Garland also wrote extensively for a variety of magazines, and in 1923 a collection of those stories was published as "The Book of the American Indian".

In 1929 Garland moved to Los Angeles, California, where he lived until his death on March 4, 1940.

Hamlin Garland

Writer