A classic of American realism, A Son of the Middle Border 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 recounts in this captivating autobiography 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 Howells, and eventually his reclaimed sense of identity as a writer of the Midwest's beautiful yet hard land. This book definitively placed Garland among such regionalist writers as Willa Gather, Sherwood Anderson, and Theodore Dreiser.