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This essay returns to the problem of representativeness in politically committed literature by analyzing Hamlin Garland’s advocacy for Henry George’s single tax in three different forms: Garland’s most famous short story (“Under the Lion’s Paw” [1889]), a dramatization of that story’s core themes (Under the Wheel [1890]), and a novelization of that drama (Jason Edwards: An Average Man [1892]). As Garland attests in his autobiography, the conclusion of George’s treatise Progress and Poverty (1879), which considers the possibilities for collective action despite what George calls “The Problem of Individual Life,” inspired Garland’s political message as well as his method of representation. After several prior attempts to balance his work’s “reform motive” with its “art motive,” Garland ultimately uses the emerging concept of the “average person” to address the problem of representativeness. By considering the aesthetic and political transformations that led from “Under the Lion’s Paw” to Jason Edwards, this essay reframes the problem of representativeness in nineteenth-century literature in relation to the rising centrality of statistical thinking.

In recognition of his achievements in literature, Hamlin Garland (1860-1940) received four honorary doctorates and a Pulitzer Prize. Keith Newlin traces the rise of this prairie farm boy with a half-formed ambition to write who then skyrocketed into international prominence before he was forty. His life is a story of ironic contradictions: the radical whose early achievement thrust him to the forefront of literary innovation but whose evolutionary aesthetic principles could not themselves adapt to changing conditions; the self-styled \"veritist\" whose credo demanded that he verify every fact but whose credulity led him to spend a lifetime seeking to confirm the existence of spirits. His need for recognition caused him to cultivate rewarding friendships with the leaders of literary culture, yet even when he attained that recognition, it was never enough, and his self-doubt caused him fits of black despair.   The first and only other biography of Hamlin Garland was published more than forty years ago; since then, letters, manuscripts, and family memoirs have surfaced to provide, along with changing literary scholarship, a more evaluative and critical interpretation of Garland's life and times. Hamlin Garland: A Life is an exploration of Garland's contributions to American literary culture and places his work within the artistic context of its time.

In recognition of his achievements in literature, Hamlin Garland (1860-1940) received four honorary doctorates and a Pulitzer Prize. Keith Newlin traces the rise of this prairie farm boy with a half-formed ambition to write who then skyrocketed into international prominence before he was forty. His life is a story of ironic contradictions: the radical whose early achievement thrust him to the forefront of literary innovation but whose evolutionary aesthetic principles could not themselves adapt to changing conditions; the self-styled \"veritist\" whose credo demanded that he verify every fact but whose credulity led him to spend a lifetime seeking to confirm the existence of spirits. His need for recognition caused him to cultivate rewarding friendships with the leaders of literary culture, yet even when he attained that recognition, it was never enough, and his self-doubt caused him fits of black despair. The first and only other biography of Hamlin Garland was published more than forty years ago; since then, letters, manuscripts, and family memoirs have surfaced to provide, along with changing literary scholarship, a more evaluative and critical interpretation of Garland's life and times.Hamlin Garland: A Lifeis an exploration of Garland's contributions to American literary culture and places his work within the artistic context of its time.

In his heyday, Hamlin Garland had a considerable reputation as a radical writer whose realistic stories and polemical essays agitating for a literature that accurately represented American life riled the nation's press. Born in poverty and raised on a series of frontier farms, Garland fled the rural Midwest in 1881 at age twenty-one. When his stories combining the radical economic theories of Henry George with realistic depictions of farm life appeared asMain-Travelled Roadsin 1891, reviewers praised his method but were disturbed by the bleak subject matter. Four years (and eight books) later, his frank depiction of sexuality in his novel of the New Woman,Rose of Dutcher's Coolly(1895), made Garland even more controversial. After realizing he couldn't make a living from such realistic works, Garland turned first to biography, then to critically panned but commercially popular romances set in the mountain west, and eventually to autobiography. In 1917 he publishedA Son of the Middle Border, a remarkable autobiography in which he combined the story of his life to 1893 with the story of U.S. westward expansion, to considerable critical acclaim and large sales. Its 1921 sequel,A Daughter of the Middle Border, received the Pulitzer Prize for biography. Although the author eventually wrote no fewer than eight autobiographies, he showed little awareness of the effect of his strong personality upon others. The sixty-six reminiscences inGarland in His Own Timeoffer an essential complement to his self-portrait by giving the perspectives of family, friends, fellow writers, and critics. The book offers the contemporary reader new reasons to return to this fascinating writer's work.

Mark Storey, \"Country Matters: Rural Fiction, Urban Modernity, and the Problem of American Regionalism\" (pp. 192–213) This essay intervenes in the critical debates surrounding nineteenth-century American regionalism, arguing that such debates have tended to ignore the possibility of a shared and trans-regional category of \"rural fiction.\" Developing this notion, I suggest that literary representations of rural life in the late nineteenth century are a crucial and neglected way of understanding the geographically indiscrete transformations of urban-capitalist modernity. Further, by examining these transformations through the prism of rural fiction, we can challenge the urban-centric tendency of postbellum American literary history. Drawing on several writers who have been the focus of much of critics' attentions on regionalism (Edward Eggleston, Hamlin Garland, and Sarah orne Jewett in particular), this essay considers both the generic and thematic instabilities of rural fiction, arguing that these instabilities serve to encode and refract the social and cultural context from which this fiction emerges. Reading rural fiction against the background of the increasing similarities between geographically distinct areas of rural life, and reconsidering many of the works that we currently gather under the regionalist rubric as, instead, rural, a distinct perspective can be gained on the standardizing and flattening processes of modernity itself.

[...]many temperance novels depict the mother in this situation as a victim of her husband's alcoholism,28 but Mary Johnson is more complicated existing as much as a victim as she is victimizer. [...]the abusive husband that so often plagued women in temperance fiction unceremoniously dies before the fourth chapter in Maggie; yet Mary's time with her husband lacks any sentimental speeches or action in the face of his drunkenness that would speak to a middle-class understanding of \"true womanhood.\" According to Mattingly, either a young child dies, as is little Tommie's fate, or they grow up and choose partners ill fitted for a happy home, as is the case with Maggie and Pete.39 Maggie's fascination with Pete, her decision to run away with him, and her eventual turn towards prostitution are directly related to Maggie's home life. [...]Pete is so annoyed with Maggie's pleas for help that he chases her from the bar as she threatens his respectability.64 Later in the novel, Crane sets up a confrontation similar to the standard temperance narrative, but subverts that narrative by removing any hint of sentimentalism.

[...]the dynamic Brennan, although not the protagonist, is the title character of the novel-he is the \"member of the third house,\" more interesting and more complex than the earnest Wilson Tuttle whose legislative victory is brought about, not by himself, but by a secondary female character, Helene's friend, Evelyn Ward, who convinces her father, another corrupt politician, to testify. [...]the farmers who are the focus of Garland's early radical writings, through Grange organizations, growers unions, special interest groups, lobbyists, and commodity traders, more than through party politics, would eventually influence market regulations, crop subsides, and tax breaks, just as writers such as Garland and Upton Sinclair, through fiction, not through politics, were able to influence public sentiment. According to Postel, \"The primacy of economics underlay much of the reform thought about women's progress. According to The Banker's Magazine, John Johnson did not open the West Salem Exchange Bank until May 1893 (with a capital of only $4,000), so \"A 'Good Fellow's' Wife\" was probably written late in 1893 or early 1894, after the exchange bank opened but before Garland began spending summers with his parents. 18.