In recognition of his achievements in literature, Hamlin Garland (1860–1940) received four honorary doctorates and a Pulitzer Prize. Keith Newlin traces the rise of this prairie farm boy with a half-formed ambition to write who then skyrocketed into international prominence before he was forty. His life is a story of ironic contradictions: the radical whose early achievement thrust him to the forefront of literary innovation but whose evolutionary aesthetic principles could not themselves adapt to changing conditions; the self-styled “veritist” whose credo demanded that he verify every fact but whose credulity led him to spend a lifetime seeking to confirm the existence of spirits. His need for recognition caused him to cultivate rewarding friendships with the leaders of literary culture, yet even when he attained that recognition, it was never enough, and his self-doubt caused him fits of black despair.

 

The first and only other biography of Hamlin Garland was published more than forty years ago; since then, letters, manuscripts, and family memoirs have surfaced to provide, along with changing literary scholarship, a more evaluative and critical interpretation of Garland’s life and times. Hamlin Garland: A Life is an exploration of Garland’s contributions to American literary culture and places his work within the artistic context of its time.

Keith Newlin is a professor of English at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and coeditor of the journal Studies in American Naturalism.  He is the coeditor of Selected Letters of Hamlin Garland (Nebraska 1998) and the editor of the forthcoming book by Isabel Garland Lord, A Summer to Be, A Memoir by the Daughter of Hamlin Garland.

“This biography is a brilliant reconstruction of the life and times of America’s great prairie realist. Newlin faced a daunting task in taking up the life of a writer whose fame occurred mainly at the beginning of his career with Main-Traveled Roads. Here he has provided invaluable details to fill in the interstices of this period of originality. But he has also masterfully narrated the rest of this fully engaged literary life with insight, wit, and deep perception. The prose is eminently readable, and the story flows as if it were a novel.”—Jerome Loving, author of The Last Titan: A Life of Theodore Dreiser

“Keith Newlin’s Hamlin Garland: A Life is a major achievement. Newlin has compressed an enormous amount of research and commentary into a clear and absorbing narrative that constitutes the first fully authoritative account of Garland’s entire life and career. Garland’s major role in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literary and cultural scene is rendered with insight, and the book as a whole is a significant contribution toward the understanding both of Garland and his times.”—Donald Pizer, Pierce Butler Professor of English Emeritus, Tulane University, and author of Hamlin Garland’s Early Work and Career

Publication of this book was assisted by grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the University of North Carolina Wilmington.