In spite of his long and productive career Hamlin Garland is a neglected literary figure. With the exception of his early collection of short stories, Main-Travelled Roads (1891), and his autobiographical A Son of the Middle Border (1917), most of his works have little or no contemporary audience, nor is he studied much in the academy, long ago having been eclipsed by other "realists" of the late nineteenth century or buried among the romantic sentimentalists of the Far West. However, Garland was at one time an influential literary critic and social thinker, and he was the chief spokesman for regionalism in American literature as well as an advocate of literary and artistic impressionism.

Garland was born to Richard H. and Isabelle McClintock Garland on a farm near New Salem, Wisconsin, on 14 September 1860. The place of his birth and the various farms and small towns in which he resided for the...