What is the title of the work you selected, and who is the author?
The selected work is A Son of the Middle Border by Hamlin Garland. His full name is Hannibal Hamlin Garland, a Pulitzer prizewinning poet, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and psychical researcher. He is best known for his extensive writing on fictional tales about industrious farmers from the Midwestern parts of America. Garland incorporates his personal life and experience to develop these characters and bring about a reality that the audience can relate to, as he was born on a farm in West Salem, Wisconsin (Garland, 1917). He had the opportunity to live in various farms in the Midwestern states before settling in Boston where his career in writing kicked off.
After skimming through this title, what do you know about the subject of this book?
The title tells a lot about the content of the book particularly in the setting where the term “Middle Border” refers to the Dakotas, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Wisconsin. Therefore, the title creates an immediate notion that the character of the book was born within one of this regions (Garland, 1917). Knowledge about the author clearly indicates that the novel is an autobiography. The author wishes to present his story to his audience so that they could know him better. The autobiography would present information that is only known to his close friends and family, including the two sides of his immediate family, the Garlands and McClintocks.
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Is the piece informative, persuasive, or descriptive? Support your answer with a short excerpt from the text.
The book A Son of the Middle Border is a descriptive text as the author attempts to provide a detailed notation of the immigration experience. He provides his family’s history that had travelled across the Atlantic from Scotland in search of a better life. The Garlands believed that in farming as a way of living hence prompting Hamlin’s father to develop a pioneering spirit (Garland, 1917). The autobiography provides a detailed description of the inability to reap the rewards from the soil despite the hard labor. He presents his experience in Dakota stating, “nearly all, even the young men, looked worn and weather-beaten and some appeared both silent and sad…..the tragic futility of their existence” (Garland, 1917). The text evidently demonstrates how many people in the society were struggling to make ends meet using farming.
Author Information
The author includes information about his ethnicity as he describes the history of his family. The immediate family, the Garlands and McClintocks, were immigrants from Scotland as previously mentioned. The author clearly indicates through the title that he is a male child. Other than the title, the author presents numerous interactions between himself and his family members. Uncle David, described as a real life hero for young Garland, believed that he would be the one to achieve success in toiling the land (Garland, 1917). The interaction between the two clearly highlighted a relationship between a boy and his uncle.
The book provides information from the beginning of his life in West Salem, Wisconsin to his middle life as a writer in Boston. Probably drawing from his family, he would travel numerous times from the middle border and further west before abandoning the vicissitudes of pioneering (Garland, 1917). However, there is little mention of his religion. The author does not seek to inform the readers of his religious beliefs as it is of little significance to him. Much of the young Garlands life is an experience of backbreaking labor. He informs the reader that Belle Garland, his mother, toiled the land from early in the day before the sun came up and late after sundown for seven days a week. The information clearly indicates that the family had little time for religious practices.
References
Garland, H. (1917) A Son of the Middle Border . Toronto, Canada: The Macmillan Co.
