A classic of American realism, A Son of the Middle Border (1917) is the true coming-of-age odyssey of a farm boy who—informed by the full brute force of a homesteaders’ life on the vast unbroken prairie—would become a preeminent American writer of the early twentieth century. Pulitzer Prize–winner Hamlin Garland’s captivating autobiography recounts his journey from a rural childhood to the study of literature and the sciences in Boston, his vital connections with such inspirations as William Dean Howell, and eventually his reclaimed sense of identity as a writer of the Midwest’s beautiful yet hard land. This definitive book placed Garland among such regionalist writers as Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, and Theodore Dreiser.