However one may judge the merit of these other writings, they are crucial to a full understanding of Garland's development and important to an appreciation of western regional literature as it was developing at the end of the nineteenth century.
The second of three children of Richard and Isabelle McClintock Garland, Hamlin Garland was born on a farm near West Salem, Wisconsin, on 14 September 1860. After spending his formative years on several farms in Wisconsin, Iowa, and South Dakota, he journeyed to Boston in the fall of 1884, where he immersed himself in the evolutionary writings of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, eagerly read Walt Whitman's poetry, and struck up a significant friendship with William Dean Howells. His reading of Henry George's Progress and Poverty (1879) in 1884 confirmed his own experiences of farm life and quickly converted him into an advocate of the single tax, which sought to correct the injustice of the unearned increment (profits made from the increased value of land) that favored property owners at the expense of the tenant farmer.
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