Hannibal Hamlin Garland (1860-1940), American author, augmented local-color writing by the new naturalistic techniques that combined realism with a sense of the individual's overwhelming struggle against a hostile environment.

In the late 1880s, when American local-color writers began to depict the brutal, dehumanizing aspects of life, the work which most effectively expressed the hardships of farmers of the northern prairies was Hamlin Garland's Main Traveled Roads (1891).

Garland was born near West Salem, Wis., on Sept. 14, 1860. Garland's father was an industrious farmer who moved his family from farm to farm in Wisconsin, Iowa, and South Dakota, hoping to wrest a better living from the fertile but unreliable fields. The successive homesteads--Garland later described them as "bare as boxes, dropped on the treeless plains"--provided little in the way of literature, but what little was available young Hamlin read with enthusiasm. His parents encouraged his literary interests and helped him...