Hannibal Hamlin Garland was born to Richard H. and Isabelle McClintock Garland in 1860 on a farm near New Salem, Wisconsin, not far from the Mississippi River. (He dropped his first name early in his life.) One of his earliest memories was of his soldier father returning home to the farm in 1865 at the end of the Civil War, an event he later put into one of his best-known stories, "The Return of a Private." Garland's best stories, indeed, would always draw heavily on his own life, for he lacked skill at invention and plotting. He was an excellent writer of description, however, and what he described best was the rural landscape of the Middle Border. By "Middle Border" Garland meant that recently settled region, not on the very edge of the frontier, where he had lived as a boy on the Garland family farms, in southwestern Wisconsin in the 1860s, in northern Iowa in the 1870s, and in eastern South Dakota (then Dakota Territory) in the 1880s.
Young Hamlin also knew town life during the five years he attended Cedar Valley Seminary in Osage, Iowa.
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