Hamlin Garland

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.
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Hamlin Garland

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.
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Hamlin Garland

Hamlin Garland

by Keith Newlin
Hamlin Garland

Hamlin Garland

by Keith Newlin

eBook

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Overview


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.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780803217713
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Publication date: 06/01/2008
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
File size: 3 MB

About the Author


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.

Table of Contents


List of Illustrations     viii
Acknowledgments     ix
Prologue: March 14, 1940     1
Return of the Private, 1860-68     7
Boy Life on the Prairie, 1868-81     17
Dakota Homesteader, 1881-84     40
Boston Mentors, 1884-85     62
The Earnest Apprentice, 1886-87     77
Single-Tax Realist, 1888     93
Life under the Wheel, 1888-89     116
Main-Travelled Roads, 1889-91     134
Table Rapper, 1890-92     148
The Campaign for Realism, 1893     170
The Iconoclast, 1893-94     185
Western Horizons, 1895     201
"Ho, for the Klondike!" 1896-98     217
The End of the Trail, 1899-1902     238
Adrift, 1903-7     263
"A Born Promoter," 1907-14     280
A Son of the Middle Border, 1914-17     307
Out of Step with the Moderns, 1918-30     327
The Historian, 1919-29     348
Fortunate Exile, 1929-40     375
Notes     405
Index     469
Index of Works   Hamlin Garland     486
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