Hamlin Garland

Garland died at age 79, at his home in Hollywood on March 4, 1940. A memorial service was held three days later near his home in Glendale, California. His ashes were buried in Neshonoc Cemetery in West Salem, Wisconsin, on March 14; his poem "The Cry of the Age" was read by Reverend John B. Fritz.

After moving to Hollywood, California, in 1929, he devoted his remaining years to investigating psychic phenomena, an enthusiasm he first undertook in 1891. In his final book, The Mystery of the Buried Crosses (1939), he tried to defend such phenomena and prove the legitimacy of psychic mediums.

In addition to novels, Garland also wrote extensively for a variety of magazines, and in 1923 a collection of those stories was published as "The Book of the American Indian".

In 1917 he wrote the autobiographical "A Son of the Middle Border", which was a critical and financial success and spawned several sequels.

Main-Travelled Roads was his first major success. It was a collection of short stories inspired by his days on the farm. He serialized a biography of Ulysses S. Grant in McClure's Magazine before publishing it as a book in 1898. The same year, Garland traveled to the Yukon to witness the Klondike Gold Rush, which inspired The Trail of the Gold Seekers (1899). He lived on a farm between Osage, and St. Ansgar, Iowa for quite some time. Many of his writings are based on this era of his life.

In 1893 Garland moved to Chicago and became a proponent of the "veritism" school of literature, which stressed realism in writing rather than the somewhat saccharine romanticism of much of popular literature of the time.

In 1891 he published a collection of his short stories and sketches, called "Main-Traveled Roads", and followed that with a pair of novels, "Prairie Folks" (1893) and "Wayside Courtships" (1897). His novels reflected the dire poverty of his childhood growing up on the western frontier, and his characters were not the sort of hardy individualists who persevered against all odds that the public believed populated the frontier; Hamlin saw little of those kinds of people growing up, and his novels detailed the poverty and despair of the frontier that he knew. The public wasn't ready to accept that portrayal of their beloved "west", and his novels weren't successful.

In 1884, at 24 years of age, he moved to Boston, Massachusetts, to pursue a career as a writer.

Novelist Hamlin Garland was born in West Salem, Wisconsin, on September 14, 1860. His father was an itinerant farmer who kept moving the family westward, to Iowa and to the wild and sparsely settled Dakota Territory (now comprising the states of North Dakota and South Dakota). Garland received little formal schooling and for the most part educated himself.