Description
Book Synopsis‘The Significant Hamlin Garland’ collects the best of Donald Pizer’s essays dealing with Garland’s early work and activities in an effort to re-establish the importance of this formative stage in his career. The essays in the first part of the book are devoted to Garland’s radical economic and artistic beliefs and activities, while those in the second half concentrate on his most permanent work of the period: ‘Main-Travelled Roads’, his novel ‘Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly’, and his autobiography ‘A Son of the Middle Border’.
Trade Review‘Donald Pizer has long been regarded as the leading scholar on Hamlin Garland. The articles collected in this volume trace Pizer’s engagement with the subject and reflect a scholar’s comprehensive grasp of the literary currents of the age. An essential book for the study of American fiction.’ —James Nagel, University of Georgia
‘Pizer enjoys a wide reputation as the most important scholar of American literary naturalism in general and of Hamlin Garland in particular. In the 1950s and 1960s Pizer first established the significance of Garland’s work, and his essays have shaped all subsequent scholarship. He later revisited Garland, measuring the writer against new directions in critical trends and reaffirming Garland’s continuing appeal for new generations of students and scholars.’ —Keith Newlin, University of North Carolina Wilmington
‘In “The Significant Hamlin Garland” Pizer gathers his pioneering essays about the life and career of an early Pulitzer Prize recipient. It contains the best work by a major critic on an important American author.’ —Gary Scharnhorst, University of New Mexico
Table of ContentsPreface; A Selected Secondary Bibliography; Editorial Note and Acknowledgments; 1. Hamlin Garland in the ‘Standard’; 2. Hamlin Garland and the Prairie West; 3. Hamlin Garland and the Radical Drama in Boston, 1889–91; 4. A Summer Campaign in Chicago: Hamlin Garland Defends a Native Art; 5. ‘Main-Travelled Roads’; 6. ‘Main-Travelled Roads’ Revisited; 7. ‘Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly’; 8. Sexuality in ‘Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly’; 9. ‘A Son of the Middle Border’; Notes; Index
