Hamlin Garland

This sequel to Garland's "A Son of the Middle Border" continues his autobiographical story as he sets out for Chicago and settles into a Bohemian encampment of artists and writers. There, he meets Zulime Taft, an artist who captures his heart and eventually becomes his wife. The intensity of this romance is rivalled only by his struggle between America's coastal elite and his heartland roots. The book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1922.

Widely regarded as the best of Hamlin Garland's novels, Rose of Dutcher's Coolly tells the story of a country girl of precocious ability who is raised by her widower father on a small Wisconsin farm. She wants to be a poet and eventually attends the university, where her talent is encouraged. A carefully crafted defense of the New Woman, the first generation of women to achieve economic and social independence, Rose of Dutcher's Coolly deals with issues that are still with us—the nature of femininity, the problem of reconciling career and family, the meaning of "love," and the need for equal opportunity. Above all, it records a nineteenth-century man's vision of a world that still eludes us, one in which men and women are equal partners. This edition reprints the text of the 1895 printing and includes an introduction that places the novel in the historical context of the early feminist movement.

A Hopi child is torn from his parents and sent off to boarding school; white settlers encroach on the Cheyenne reservation, and the Cheyenne vow to fight to the death rather than give up their land; Howling Wolf witnesses the brutal murder of his brother and, when he protests, is in turn brutalized; after Sitting Bull's triumph over Custer's forces, he vows to fight to the death rather than submit to the white invaders. In these and other stories written from 1890–1905, Hamlin Garland sought to capture his vision of the spirit of the Native American Indian in transition. Based on ten years of visits to reservations in the American West, these stories are of interest for readers today in part because they illustrate a sincere and well-intentioned white reformer coming to understand a culture radically at odds with his own—and discovering in the process that his own culture is less "advanced" than he had supposed.