Prairie Folks

by Hamlin Garland

A collection of stories which illustrate the influence of Henry George's Single Tax Movement on Garland's work.


Nearly all the stories in this volume were written at the same time and under the same impulse as those which compose its companion volume, Main-Travelled Roads - and the entire series was the result of a summer-vacation visit to my old home in Iowa, to my father's farm in Dakota, and, last of all, to my birthplace in Wisconsin. This happened in 1887. I was living at the time in Boston, and had not seen the West for several years, and my return to the scenes of my boyhood started me upon a series of stories delineative of farm and village life as I knew it and had lived it. I wrote busily during the two years that followed, and in this revised definitive edition of Main-Travelled Roads and its companion volume. Other Main-Travelled Roads (compiled from other volumes which now go out of print), the reader will find all of the short stories which came from my pen between 1887 and 1889.
It remains to say that, though conditions have changed somewhat since that time, yet for the hired man and the renter farm life in the West is still a stern round of drudgery. My pages present it - not as the summer boarder or the young lady novelist sees it - but as the working farmer endures it.

Genres: Short Stories, American

Library Binding

First published January 1, 1893

About the author

Stories and novels of American writer Hannibal Hamlin Garland include the autobiographical A Son of the Middle Border and depict the hardships that Midwestern farmers endured.

People best know this American novelist, poet, essayist, and short story writer for his fiction, involving hard-working Midwestern farmers.

Hannibal Hamlin Garland was born on a farm near West Salem, Wisconsin, on September 14, 1860, the second of four children of Richard Garlin of Maine and Charlotte Isabelle McClintock. The boy was named after Hannibal Hamlin, then candidate for vice-president under Abraham Lincoln. He lived on various Midwestern farms throughout his young life, but settled in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1884 to pursue a career in writing. He read diligently in the public library there. His first success came in 1891 with Main-Traveled Roads, 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.

A prolific writer, Garland continued to publish novels, short fiction, and essays. In 1917, he published his autobiography, A Son of the Middle Border. The book's success prompted a sequel, A Daughter of the Middle Border, for which Garland won the 1922 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. After two more volumes, Garland began a second series of memoirs based on his diary. Garland naturally became quite well known during his lifetime and had many friends in literary circles. He was made a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1918.

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.

A friend, Lee Shippey, columnist for the Los Angeles Times, recalled Garland's regular system of writing:
. . . he got up at half past five, brewed a pot of coffee and made toast on an electric gadget in his study and was at work by six. At nine o'clock he was through with work for the day. Then he breakfasted, read the morning paper and attended to his personal mail. . . . After luncheon he and Mrs. Garland would take a long drive . . . . Sometimes they would drop in on Will Rogers, Will Durant, Robert Benchley or even on me, for their range of friends was very wide. . . . After dinner they would go to a show if an exceptionally good one were in town, otherwise one of their daughters would read aloud.

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.

The Hamlin Garland House in West Salem is a historical site.

Reviews

[John Eidswick · Rating 3 out of 5]

An unbalanced mix of stories set in rural Iowa, some intended to provide realistic glimpses of life in the kind of region Garland grew up in, others to promote Garland's conception of ideal social arrangement by way of painting country folks as poor, pitiful, childlike savages by comparison to dignified, fashionable, art-loving city folk. And, um, other kinds of stories too.

Despite it feeling like a book written by seven bad authors when it was in fact written by only one mediocre-to-good writer, I'm still happy I read it. An interesting artifact from a time of turbulent changes in American society.

[Sharon Zink · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a collection of short stories and novellas about people who lived out towards where the American frontier began. Good writing, interesting content.

[Susan Fetterer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Prairie Folks is a charmer. 1892, the publication date. Nine chapters are snapshots of settlers and pioneers struggling to make a life for themselves, raise crops, feed their families, build communities, find a little joy with the elements, exhaustion, and economics creating roadblocks.
Hamlin Garland’s storytelling style is Twainish—there are touches of irony and humor. Along with tragedy and the challenges endemic with human life.
There are unexpected sociopolitical similarities highlighted in several of the stories...it is clear that, for example, in ‘Drifting Crane’, awareness of the government’s treatment of native Americans was of profound concern to the author. Nothing of substance has changed. Since the early 1880’s.
Ponderable, to say the least.
I loved the complimentary reference to British author Wilkie Collins, author of The Woman in White.
An afterthought as I think back on my reactions to the stories: there is an element of the essay and social commentary in these stories...
In closing, recommend reading works written looooong before today’s date.

[Humphrey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Prairie Folks is a curiously imbalanced collection, one which indicates Garland's strange flux between genres. A couple stories are political, somewhat in the vein of some of the more forceful stories from Main-Traveled Roads but more annoyingly polemical (these deserve two stars). A few stories are more in the vein of local color. These are much more compelling, though without much literary merit outside their genre. The best stories, however, fall somewhere in between, hinging on a moment in which a hardened Midwestern farmer must trade strength for spirit: Ethan Ripley's Speculation (which would be republished in the expanded Main-Traveled Roads), Bacon's Hired Man, and Daddy Deering.