This book collects the best of Donald Pizer’s essays dealing with Hamlin Garland’s early work and activities in to re-establish the importance of this formative stage in his career.

‘The Significant Hamlin Garland’ collects the best of Donald Pizer’s essays dealing with Garland’s early work and activities in an effort to re-establish the importance of this formative stage in his career. The essays in the first part of the book are devoted to Garland’s radical economic and artistic beliefs and activities, while those in the second half concentrate on his most permanent work of the period: ‘Main-Travelled Roads’, his novel ‘Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly’, and his autobiography ‘A Son of the Middle Border’.

Preface; A Selected Secondary Bibliography; Editorial Note and Acknowledgments; 1. Hamlin Garland in the ‘Standard’; 2. Hamlin Garland and the Prairie West; 3. Hamlin Garland and the Radical Drama in Boston, 1889–91; 4. A Summer Campaign in Chicago: Hamlin Garland Defends a Native Art; 5. ‘Main-Travelled Roads’; 6. ‘Main-Travelled Roads’ Revisited; 7. ‘Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly’; 8. Sexuality in ‘Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly’; 9. ‘A Son of the Middle Border’; Notes; Index

In this collection of essays on Hamlin Garland, Donald Pizer attempts to re-establish the wealth and importance of the early work and activities of the radical, Pulitzer Prize–winning writer from the Midwest. Essays in the opening half of the book are devoted to Garland’s radical economic and artistic beliefs and activities, while those in the second part concentrate on his most permanent, well-known work of this period: ‘Main-Travelled Roads, Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly’, and ‘A Son of the Middle Border’.

In the preface to this volume, Pizer traces the overall coherence of Garland’s early ideas and fiction. Garland, Pizer demonstrates, found in his reading of radical writers of the period an explanation of the hardships and limitations of prairie life that he had personally experienced; he then translated this union of concept and actuality into a powerful expressive tool in his acclaimed prairie fictions.

Pizer includes several of his late essays on Garland in this book, in which he suggests, on the basis of his own critical development, that Garland’s finest writing dealing with late nineteenth-century Midwestern life also contains sexual and Edenic themes which transcend the immediate social and economic conditions of this period and help to explain the significance and lastingness of his early body of work.