Hamlin Garland

At The Millions, Greg Walkin has unexpected praise for the long-forgotten Hamlin Garland, once one of the glimmering stars of the Midwest literary firmament. (I apologize for the hackneyed metaphor.) Though Garland's short stories sound a bit too polemical for my tastes (a story written for "the express purpose of persuading voters to enact a land value tax"? egad!), this does remind me that I should dust off my retired library copy of the Pulitzer-winning A Daughter of the Middle Border, which I picked up about five or six years ago but still haven't read - and which, with the Will County Book Recycling coming up this weekend, promises to soon be buried even deeper in my TBR pile.