A Spoil of Office: A Story of the Modern West
A young man drives a wagon loaded with laughing farmers to a Grange picnic in 1870s Iowa, and nobody notices him. Bradley Talcott is a hired hand, invisible at the margins of a world that seems to have no place for his restlessness. Then he hears Ida Wilbur speak, and everything shifts. Her words about dignity and resistance crack open something in him that had been sleeping. What follows is the education of a man who wants badly to matter, who watches power from the outside and begins to believe he might reach for it. Garland captures the particular ache of American ambition: the hunger to be more than what you were born into, the cost of wanting, the way hope can make a person reckless. This is the American Midwest before it's nostalgic, when the struggle to survive and succeed felt raw and urgent. For readers who love quiet novels about big hungers.
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“I see a time when the farmer will not need to live in a lonely cabin on a lonely farm. I see the farmers coming together in groups. I see them with time to read, and time to visit with their fellows. I see them enjoying lectures in beautiful halls, erected in every village. I see them gather like the Saxons of old upon the green at evening to sing and dance. I see cities rising near them with schools, and churches, and concert halls, and theaters. I see a day when the farmer will no longer be a drudge and his wife a bond slave, but happy men and women who will go singing to their pleasant tasks upon their fruitful farms. When the boys and girls will not go west nor to the city; when life will be worth living. In that day the moon will be brighter and the stars more glad, and pleasure and poetry and love of life come back to the man who tills the soil.””
— Hamlin Garland
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Garland, Hamlin. A Spoil of Office: A Story of the Modern West. Lex, lex-books.com/book/a-spoil-of-office-a-story-of-the-modern-west-3fbaba59-a25d-4e8c-b2cd-fe31d45ad1c8.Garland, H. (n.d.). A Spoil of Office: A Story of the Modern West. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/a-spoil-of-office-a-story-of-the-modern-west-3fbaba59-a25d-4e8c-b2cd-fe31d45ad1c8Garland, Hamlin. A Spoil of Office: A Story of the Modern West. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/a-spoil-of-office-a-story-of-the-modern-west-3fbaba59-a25d-4e8c-b2cd-fe31d45ad1c8.
