Hamlin Garland - Son of the Middle Border

In all the region of autobiography, so far as I know it, I do not know quite the like of Mr. Garland's story of his life, and I should rank it with the very greatest of that kind in literature.... It is the poet who sees the vast scale of human struggle with nature or the things she will withhold unless they are forced from her by man's tireless toil and mighty mechanism, and in the vision he knows a battle-joy as distinctive of this Son of the Middle Border as his fidelity to the sordid and squalid details of the campaign, or his exultation of the beauty of the West which he has so passionately hated and finally so passionately loves. As you read the story of his life you realize it the memorial of a generation, of a whole order of American experience; as you review it you perceive it an epic of such mood and make as has not been imagined before.(Introduction by William Dean Howells, New York Times review, August 26, 1917)