A Son of the Middle Border was published by Macmillan in 1917, and it is Garland’s finest work — a memoir of his family’s westward migration that captures the reality of American frontier life with a vividness and honesty that no other book has matched.
The Garland family moves westward in the classic American pattern: from Maine to Wisconsin to Iowa to the Dakotas, always seeking better land, always believing that the next move will bring prosperity. Garland’s father, Richard, is the driving force — a restless, ambitious man who never stays long enough in one place to see the returns on his labor. His mother, Isabel, follows reluctantly, watching each move take her further from the civilization, the neighbors, and the comforts she values. The tension between them — the man who wants to move and the woman who wants to stay — is the emotional center of the book and one of the great marital portraits in American literature.
Garland describes the physical reality of frontier farming with the authority of someone who lived it: the backbreaking work of breaking sod, the isolation of prairie winters, the grasshopper plagues that could destroy a year’s crop in hours, the social poverty of communities with no churches, no schools, and no entertainment beyond the work itself. He does not romanticize the frontier — the mythology of the West as a place of freedom and opportunity is continuously undermined by the reality of exhaustion, debt, and failure.
The book was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and established Garland as a major American autobiographer. Its sequel, A Daughter of the Middle Border, won the Pulitzer in 1922.
Collecting A Son of the Middle Border
First edition (Macmillan, New York, 1917): Blue cloth, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $60–$200
- Without jacket: $15–$40
- Later editions: $8–$15