Hamlin GarlandBesprekingen

Good stories about the midwest area and farming people. Had to read it for English in 10th grade, I think, but worthwhile anyway!

Was an alright read. Mostly about missed opportunities with some adventure, river raft chapter being the best.

An adult son remembers his mother and his childhood and adolescence. The book shows the westward expansion of the United States as the family moves from Wisconsin across Iowa and into South Dakota over the years. The somewhat archaic language lends beauty to this description of a woman who worked hard and loved her family.½

Hamlin Garland opens up life in both Wisconsin and the mountains out West the late 1800s, then proceeds to illuminate Chicago and New York City in the early 1900s.
An early believer in equal marriage and feminism, his writings were unique though they took a long time to be valued. Though proud and with a slow growing reputation,
he remained honest about himself, his disappointments, his restless feelings and depressions. This book is the sequel to SON OF THE MIDDLE BORDER. Both are
invaluable for understanding the early settlers of Middle Wisconsin.

As a midwesterner I knew the early pioneers had it tough but it was really very bleak. It is comparable to Giants in the Earth.

This book was awesome and all about Minnesota and Wisconsin settlers and loggers. I want to read all of the books by this author.

Many pioneers set out from the East to fill the land clear across to the west coast. Why did they go? What gave them the courage to leave their homes, families and friends, possibly never to see them again? This story makes an attempt to help us understand these things. It is the story of the Graham family, and Richard in particular. Following him from boyhood to his mid-thirties, from the time when he ran away from home and servitude in his young teens, the decision to go west with his parents when he was nineteen, and his service in the Civil War. In the telling of Richard's life story, the author tells us of the pioneers. I found this to be an interesting story, not overly sentimental, though it borders on that at times as much of the writing from the 20s does. It was at its best when talking about the motivations of the people for what they did during the movement west and the Civil War. I felt that I could be reading about my own family, who lived through these events in similar places.

My fond memories of growing up in Wisconsin create a warm place in my heart for this memoir about growing up in a Wisconsin of the previous century; then as the mid-western frontier. Hamlin Garland captures the essence of the place and time that was already a distant memory during my boyhood. He does this through advocacy of a form of realism that blended the realist's insistence upon verisimilitude of detail with the impressionist's tendency to paint objects as they appear to his individual eye.

He begins in a tremendously moving fashion with the first time he met his father who was returning home from the Civil War in 1864, as he was a baby when his father went off to war.
""Come here , my little man," my father said.--"My little man!" Across the space of a half-a-century I can still hear the sad reproach in his voice. "Won't you come and see your poor old father when he comes home from the war?"
"My little man!" How significant that phrase seems to me now! The war had in very truth come between this patriot and his sons. I had forgotten him--the baby had never known him."(p 6)

Garland narrates his memoir in chronological fashion tracing the events of his boyhood, first in Wisconsin and later in Iowa, and continuing into adulthood with his own travels and development as a writer. He uses a first person narrator but, he has two different "I"s telling the story. Using a "double angle of vision" Garland frequently shifts from telling his story from a youthful perspective to viewing the events and commenting on their significance as an adult. It is a very personal narrative where he does not claim to be telling the literal truth but only his personal or interior truth. The story is shaped by his own reminiscences and recollections of the past forming a sort of literary impressionism that Garland called "veritism". The veritist differed from the realist, Garland claimed, in his insistence upon the centrality of the artist's individual vision: the artist should paint life as he sees it. In doing this he brings his world alive for the reader.

The stories of his family life, with his brother on the farm and in school, his uncle David playing the fiddle, and the life of the prairie with its flora and fauna were the sections that I enjoyed the most. In later life he would go on to write short stories that were gathered in the collection Main-Travelled Roads and, four years after Son of the Middle Border he wrote Daughter of the Middle Border for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. I think the depiction of a warm family life on the prairie, a region's characters, customs, and textures of life creates an interesting read even for those who do not share a personal connection with the beauty of Midwestern life.

a lot of fun and an insight to prarie life in the middle to late 1800s. short stories, some make you encourage the characters to do right, some make you cry, some make you laugh, but none make you feel like you shouldnt have spent every penny on this book

(depending how manz pennys)½

This was quite a surprise to me. I expected it to be overly sentimental and wordy, as so many novels from the early 1900s can be, but instead, it is a gripping story with much information and value. To be sure, it has its share of sentiment, but the author doesn't dwell there, and the action was enough that I didn't want to put it down at several points. It is a somewhat romanticized version of an Indian reservation, yet it is intentionally so. It puts forth the idealized (at least from the author's viewpoint) way which Native Americans could be brought into the civilization of the white man. However, the ideas within are very modern in the sense that Garland gives full respect to the natives and does not trot out the typical agenda of making them "just like us." He is quite harsh on cowboys and settlers, but someone had to be. I got quite a laugh out of the dialogues of the cowboys, having been raised around them, I found it to ring true. He is also very frank about the shabby way the natives were treated and the many misconceptions about them. I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the settlement of the western states in America.

1686 A Son of the Middle Border, by Hamlin Garland (read 10 Jan 1982) This book, which I remember hearing a lot about in my youth, is the story of Garland's life, told from the beginning of his consciousness in about 1865 (he was born in 1860) until 1893, when he is settling his parents into a house in Wisconsin. His family left Wisconsin when he was under ten and they moved to a farm near Osage, Iowa. Later they went on to Brown County, S.D. Hamlin went east when he was 21, and wrote, etc. What can I say? The writing is florid and over-ripe--he is over-dramatic, and also excessively pessimistic. And every ending is sad. I have very mixed feelings about this book--in some ways it is awfully naive, but some of the lines about life are strikingly beautiful: "The flash and ripple and glimmer of the tall sunflowers, the myriad voices of gleeful bobolinks, the chirp and gurgle of red-winged blackbirds swaying on the willows, the meadow-larks piping from grassy bogs, the peep of the prairie chick, and the wailing call of plover on the flowery green slopes of the uplands made it all an ecstatic world to me."½

1687 A Daughter of the Middle Border, by Hamlin Garland (read 10 Jan 1982) (Pulitzer Biography prize for 1922) This is the direct sequel of A Son of the Middle Border, covering the time up to Garland's father's death in 1914. It is really a repulsive book. Garland is a super-pessimist. When he talks about good times he bemoans the fact that they are past--his bemoaning of past misfortunes seems to be what he likes. Obviously the poor guy had no Faith and he would have been a lot better off with such. The book is an awful book, and I am glad to be done with it.½

1688 Back-Trailers From the Middle Border, by Hamlin Garland (read 11 Jan 1982) This covers Garland's life from 1914 to 1928. It is a better book than A Daughter of the Middle Border, but that is not saying much. A large part of this book tells of summers in England. He is not so pessimistic in this book, and his not overly profound philosophizing isn't too boring. Some of his reverent words about olden times appealed to the genealogist in me. I would not mind reading a really first-rate interpretive biography of Garland, though I doubt there is one. He really is not a major figure in American literature.

1689 Main-Travelled Roads, by Hamlin Garland (read 12 Jan 1982) This supposedly is the only "important" book Garland wrote. It is his first book, published in 1893. It is a book of short stories. Some were not bad. My favorite was "Uncle Ethan Ripley," about a farmer who lets a patent medicine salesman paint a sign on his barn for 25 bottles of the medicine. I found it funny--Garland is seldom funny. Some of the stories are, of course, stark, but not all of them.½

Liked this book when young (before 1974)½

A classic of American realism, A Son of the Middle Border (1917) is the true coming-of-age odyssey of a farm boy who—informed by the full brute force of a homesteaders’ life on the vast unbroken prairie—would become a preeminent American writer of the early twentieth century. Pulitzer Prize–winner Hamlin Garland’s captivating autobiography recounts his journey from a rural childhood to the study of literature and the sciences in Boston, his vital connections with such inspirations as William Dean Howell, and eventually his reclaimed sense of identity as a writer of the Midwest’s beautiful yet hard land. This definitive book placed Garland among such regionalist writers as Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, and Theodore Dreiser. (Product Description)

With illustrations by H.T. Carpenter. With an introduction by W.D. Howells. This Elibron Classics book is a reprint of a 1898 edition by Herbert S. Stone & Company, Chicago & New York. (Product Description)