A Summer to Be

In A Summer to Be, Isabel Garland Lord writes an honest and revealing memoir of growing up in the shadow of her famous father, the pioneering realist and Pulitzer Prize–winning author Hamlin Garland. Lord unveils a hitherto unknown side of her father—the intensely loving, domineering patriarch whose deep love for his eldest daughter led him to change the trajectory of his career even as that love impeded his daughter’s own independence. Written in the 1960s, A Summer to Be movingly weaves the story of Lord’s own coming of age that is also a snapshot of American literary culture during the first decades of the twentieth century. Part memoir and part autobiography, A Summer to Be records a daughter’s gradual emergence from her devoted and possessive father; it is a story full of moments of revelation and intrigue, betrayal and guilt, and ultimately the joy of self-discovery.