A Daughter of the Middle Border
Hamlin Garland returned to Wisconsin not as the successful Eastern writer he'd become, but as a son coming home to witness his parents' final chapter. A Daughter of the Middle Border continues the Pulitzer-winning author's autobiographical odyssey, tracing his decision to leave Boston and return to the family homestead in West Salem to care for his aging parents. The result is neither sentimental tribute nor simple nostalgia: it's a clear-eyed reckoning with the brutal dignity of pioneer life, the weight of inheritance, and the strange grief of watching the world that made you disappear one season at a time. Garland's father remains a stoic holdout against change, while his mother carries her own quiet sorrows and unspoken longings. Through these intimate domestic scenes, Garland examines what it means to be both rooted and restless, to owe everything to a landscape you've spent your life escaping, and to find that the Middle Border refuses to stay in the past.
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“I confess that as I saw the tender plants and shining flowers bow before the remorseless beam, civilisation seemed a sad business, and yet there was something epic, something large-gestured and splendid in the "breaking" season. Smooth, glossy and unwrinkled the thick ribbon of jet-black sod rose upon the share and rolled away from the mold-board's glistening curve to tuck itself upside down into the furrow beneath the horse's heels, and the picture which my uncle made, gave me pleasure in spite of the sad changes he was making.””
— Hamlin Garland
“Thus it happened that my first impressions of life were martial, and my training military, for my father brought back from his two years' campaigning under Sherman and Thomas the temper and habit of a soldier.””
— Hamlin Garland
“There were moments of a morning or at sunset when the plain was splendid as a tranquil sea, and in such moments I bowed down to its mysterious beauty--but for the most part it seemed an empty, desolate, mocking world.””
— Hamlin Garland
“Each of our lives was knit into these hedges and rooted in these fields and yet, notwithstanding all this, in response to some powerful yearning, my father was about to set out for the fifth time into the still more remote and untrodden west.””
— Hamlin Garland
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Garland, Hamlin. A Daughter of the Middle Border. Lex, lex-books.com/book/a-daughter-of-the-middle-border-cbd0aa08-6394-4381-abd8-790ac9a498e6.Garland, H. (n.d.). A Daughter of the Middle Border. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/a-daughter-of-the-middle-border-cbd0aa08-6394-4381-abd8-790ac9a498e6Garland, Hamlin. A Daughter of the Middle Border. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/a-daughter-of-the-middle-border-cbd0aa08-6394-4381-abd8-790ac9a498e6.
