Hamlin Garland, about 1901
(Hannibal) Hamlin Garland was born in West Salem, Wisconsin the year prior to the outbreak of the Civil War, and so in the group of writers we’ve been reading so far, he represents a younger generation. His early years were spent on various western homesteads, and as an adult he travelled throughout the West and to Alaska, always infusing his experiences into his writing. He is best know for his story collection, Main-Travelled Roads (1891) and as a champion of the local color/regional form and something he more specifically called “veritism” (see “Hamlin Garland’s Literary Creed” from Keith Newlin’s Hamlin Garland website). In his early work, of which “Up the Coolly” is a good representation, he was absolutely committed to a reformist fiction combining close, local observation with a realism akin to that of his friend and mentor, William Dean Howells. The stories collected in Main-Travelled Roads, in addition to other stories he would later collect as Other Main-Travelled Roads (1910), novels, and an autobiography, A Son of the Middle Border (1917), represent the agrarian life of the Middle Border, a place not precisely on edge of the frontier but in the recently settled areas in which homesteading families were trying to scrape a living off the land, and no matter how remote, as we’ll see in “Coolly,” coming into conflict with Eastern monied interests.
REFERENCE
“Garland, (Hannibal) Hamlin (1860-1940).” Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia of American Literature. George B. Perkins, Barbara Perkins, and Phillip Leininger. Vol. 1. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. 370. Literature Resource Center. Web. 27 Jan. 2013.
Newlin, Keith. Hamlin Garland. N.p., 29 Sept. 2005. Web. 27 Jan. 2013.
Stronks, James B. “(Hannibal) Hamlin Garland.” American Realists and Naturalists. Ed. Donald Pizer and Earl N. Harbert. Detroit: Gale Research, 1982. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 12. Literature Resource Center. Web. 27 Jan. 2013.