Garland, Hamlin, 1860-1940

Hamlin Garland, also known as Hannibal Hamlin Garland, (born September 14, 1860, West Salem, Wisconsin – died March 4, 1940, Hollywood, California), an author who put his own part of the country on the literary map, is best remembered by the title he gave his autobiography, Son of the Middle Border. Gaining his spurs with a successful collection of grimly naturalistic 'down home' stories in 1891, Garland came to prominence just as the "frontier" mentality was losing out to the waves of settlement in California and the West. Garland, however, looked to his roots in Wisconsin and the Upper Midwest, urging the idea that this, too, had been borderland in his own lifetime.

In later years Garland wrote extensively about Indian affairs, conservation, art, and literary trends; he also expanded his geographic range to include romances of the Far West, yet it was his reminiscences of his early years which stamped him in the public mind, and to which he turned again and again for inspiration. Such was Garland's prestige after election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1918, and after winning the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1922, that he acceded to the unofficial title of "Dean of American Letters" at a time (the age of Hemingway, O'Neill, Faulkner, Dos Passos, Fitzgerald) when his own writing was growing conspicuously out of date. In his later years, Garland moved to Los Angeles, residing on DeMille Drive in Hollywood. He lectured at USC in the mid-1930s; and his personal library along with some 8000 letters from fellow writers, publishers, and admirers came to USC after Garland's death, forming the cornerstone of the American Literature Collection.