Back-Trailers From the Middle Border

New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company, 1928. First Edition, First printing. Hardcover. Good. Constance Garland. x, [2], 379, [1] pages. Illustrated endpapers. This book is the fourth and last in the author's series of books describing his migratory family. In this book, he records the removal of his family to the East, a reversal of the family progress. Only a small part of the material gained in England has been used. The method of choice has been to include only those experiences in which the author's daughters had a share. Includes black and white illustrations by his daughter Constance Garland. Hannibal Hamlin Garland was born on September 14, 1860. He settled in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1884 to pursue a career in writing. Main-Travelled Roads was his first major success. It was 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). 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. He was made a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1918. This is an autobiographic chronicle of a group of migratory American families, whose lives describe the wide arc from 1840 to 1928, the better part of a century in time, and of immeasurable extent when expressed in social betterment and material invention. This is Garland's final book in his "Border" Series, and probably the most interesting---retelling his meetings and relationships with many famous writers in England--including Kipling, Barrie, and Shaw---as well as his relationships with President Rooseelt, William Dean Howells and many others. Garland won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography.