A Son of the Middle Border
The prairie remembers what we forget. Hamlin Garland's masterpiece charts one man's impossible journey from the furrows of a Wisconsin farm to the literary salons of Boston, and somehow, impossibly, back to himself. Raised on the vast unbroken plain during the decades after the Civil War, young Hamlin inherits his father's restless hunger for something beyond the next harvest. His father returns from the war broken and restless, dragging his family across the frontier in pursuit of a dream that keeps receding. Yet it is the land itself the raw, terrifying, gorgeous Middle Border that becomes Garland's true subject. This is not nostalgia; it is reckoning. He writes with brutal honesty about the toll the homesteaders' life took on families, the drudgery, the loss, the particular loneliness of the plains. But he also captures a wild beauty that no other American writer has rendered so precisely: the way light moves across wheat, the terrifying silence of winter, the explosive green of spring. Garland's journey to become a writer in the East forces him to confront a devastating question: what does it mean to leave the place that made you?
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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 Son of the Middle Border. Lex, lex-books.com/book/a-son-of-the-middle-border-1b9251d0-1c54-4440-9b67-393c76c4538d.Garland, H. (n.d.). A Son of the Middle Border. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/a-son-of-the-middle-border-1b9251d0-1c54-4440-9b67-393c76c4538dGarland, Hamlin. A Son of the Middle Border. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/a-son-of-the-middle-border-1b9251d0-1c54-4440-9b67-393c76c4538d.
