Hamlin Garland

Born in West Salem, Wisconsin, in 1860, Hamlin Garland grew up as his farming family moved west through Iowa and the Dakotas. That firsthand experience of hard rural labor became the heart of his writing, and after heading to Boston in 1884 to pursue a literary career, he began publishing fiction that pushed back against romanticized pictures of frontier life.

Garland is especially remembered for Main-Travelled Roads (1891), a short-story collection that portrayed Midwestern farmers with grit, compassion, and realism. He also developed his own critical idea of "veritism," arguing for fiction that was truthful and socially aware, a view he set out in Crumbling Idols (1894). Later, his autobiographical "Middle Border" books brought him wide praise.

The best known of those memoirs are A Son of the Middle Border and its sequel, A Daughter of the Middle Border, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1922. He died in Hollywood, California, in 1940, leaving behind a body of work that still stands out for its plainspoken style and deep feeling for the people of the rural Midwest.