The Pulitzer-winning author whose hard-eyed stories of Iowa farm life defined Midwestern realism.
Hamlin Garland spent his formative boyhood on a farm near Osage, in northern Iowa, and drew on that hard prairie life for his fiction. His story collection “Main-Travelled Roads” (1891) portrayed farm hardship with unusual honesty.
His memoir “A Son of the Middle Border” and its sequel, “A Daughter of the Middle Border” — which won the 1922 Pulitzer Prize — made his Iowa-and-Midwest upbringing part of the American canon.
Garland's unsentimental “veritism” influenced generations of Midwestern writers and preserved a clear picture of 19th-century Iowa farm life.
His boyhood region near Osage is part of his literary legacy.
The Pulitzer-winning author whose hard-eyed stories of Iowa farm life defined Midwestern realism.
Hamlin Garland was from Osage, Iowa.
1860–1940.
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