ABSTRACT
Three very different writers—Harold Frederic, Joseph Kirkland, and Hamlin Garland—turned to the theme of farm life, and dealt with it in a mordantly realistic vein. It was the same year, 1887, that Garland, alone and brooding over his studies at the Boston Public Library; wrote his first sketches of life in the Middle Border. Depression had settled on the Middle Border, and Garland returning to the familiar fields from his Boston studies felt the depression in every fiber of his being. To a later generation that never knew the pioneer hardships of the Middle Border, Garland seems strangely remote and old-fashioned; yet his intellectual antecedents are both ancient and honorable. Perhaps that fact unconsciously determined his scornful rejection of the Boston genteel in literature; at any rate his denial of the sovereignty of the New England literary rulers left him free to follow other masters who seemed to him more significant.
