Customer Reviews

A Son of the Middle Border (Twentiety-Century Classics)

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This is easily in my top ten list of books. Wonderful account of growing up in the upper Midwest after the War Between the States. Hamlin Garland writes with a great sense of place and a love of the land.

It is exciting to stumble upon this classic work and to ascertain it is absolutely readable and fresh. This work is constantly cited in support of regional factors constituting part of the experience of American writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In 1863 Garland's father made the last payment on the mortgage on his farm and that same day he enlisted as a soldier in the Civil War.

The father was born in Maine. The family moved west via the Erie Canal and the Great Lakes, landing in Milwaukee. The children were told stories of the war and of the prairies of Wisconsin. The farm was near the LaCrosse River in western Wisconsin.

The author's grandfather was an Adventist, believing in the second coming. The McClintocks, maternal relatives, were farmers. The author's Grandfather Garland was a carpenter. Hamlin received his first literary instruction from his paternal, New England, grandfather.

To his father change was alluring. The father was eager to sell the farm in 1868 and push away onward to Iowa. The new farm was right on the edge of Looking Glass Prairie. When the family moved in February the children whined and the mother conveyed worry. His mother was in terror of the ice. At ten Hamlin was plowing at the family's third farm, located in Mitchell County near the Minnesota line. The name of the town was Osage. The schoolhouse was the center of social life on the bare prairie. The family rented land for their crops and broke sod and built a homestead on their new land. In addition to prairie there were hazel thickets. The curriculum pursued in the school was set forth in the McGuffey Readers. A singing school was started in Osage. Social changes were in progress. There were no more quilting bees and barn raisings. The women visited less often. Singing was confined to hymn tunes.

Garland tries to dispel the merry yeoman fantasy. The cowyard smelled of manure. Most farming duties require the lapse of years to seem beautiful. Haying was a season of charm. The author recalls buying his first deck of cards.

Growing up in the West were organizations called the Patrons of Husbandry, the Grange. The Lyceum took the place of the singing schools. Amusements had changed. The father was asked to become the official grain buyer for the country. He was to take charge of the new elevator in Osage. The family changed from farm to village, renting a house on the edge of town.

The family returned to the farm after a year. The wheat harvest was in jeopardy from the chinch bug. Hamlin went to Cedar Valley Seminary for two years. Grain buying had declined with grain growing and the border was moving. Many of the settlers were going to Dakota.

Hamlin and his brother Franklin went to Boston and various places on the East Coast. Broadway in New York seemed to be an abnormal congestion of human souls. Later Hamlin took a job being a school teacher in the Midwest. He was persuaded to go to Boston to study literature and found himself in a school for oratory, and with the passage of time, a teacher of literature himself. Returning West after seven years he saw that every house had its stamp of solid strugge. As to pioneering, the free land was gone. Garland was excited to meet William Dean Howells and to be considered by him a fellow writer.

This is a great book from 2 angles: first, it's a great coming-of-age story. Second, as a reader in 2007, it's a wonderful window into the world of 1870-1900s America which was not so long ago, but worlds away.

The language is a little formal and flowery, which is funny in light of the fact that Garland broke ground in American literary circles as a gritty "realist" writer. But even that serves to draw a more complete picture of the era.

Though not a masterful classic, this is a fascinating and rewarding literary biography/realist-naturalist memoir. As others note, it uniquely captures the latter pioneer era of the upper midwest, the "middle border" between the settled east and the nearly vanished and uncultivated wild frontier. A few wild indians (i.e. native americans) drop in and out of the story, and there's plenty of wild flora and fauna.

Perhaps the most intriguing facets involve Garland's contrasting lifestyles - the boom, bust, and always grinding work on the farm, set off against his, and his brother's, moves to the east and the literary and show-business worlds or the late nineteenth century.

There's an amusing anecdote of his role in recovering Crane's Red Badge from a typist's lien, but the serious literary aspects involve the foreshadowing of what follows, both immediately and in the next half-century. London and Norris are mentioned, but there are hints of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in the settings and artistry, and plenty of Steinbeck is foreshadowed. Among Garland's now forgotten predecessors, there are worthwhile discussions of Kirkland and Eggleston.

The "radical" politics is an historical curiousity, but somehow it seems shoehorned into the text.

Though a mish-mash of themes over an extended period, there's plenty of lyricism mixed with the realism for which he's justifiably remembered.

It's fascinating to read the words of someone who was raised by homesteaders/farmers/settlers in the 1800s. The Garlands saw everything: the last of the American Indians living a free life, the breaking of the sod, the extended Irish-Scots family gathering for fiddling and songs, the desperately hard life of farming families, and he notes with sadness the particularly hard life of the women, whose slave-like labor didn't even get a break on Sunday, when everyone needed special clothes and a dish for a picnic. Garland was also unusual in that he had a burning desire to escape the farm and become a writer, first in Boston, then New York, and later Chicago. He moves into intellectual circles far removed from the primitive living conditions of the homesteaders, whose lives were literally handmade from house to clothes to food. But he realizes his voice best serves the farmers and he returns to farm country to becomes the voice of his people.