'A Son of the Middle Border' isn't your dusty, dry-to-the-touch American classic. Imagine sitting down with your smartest, wittiest great-grandparent after they've had a couple glasses of wine. That's the voice in this memoir. Hamlin Garland left his family's hardscrabble Iowa farm to chase an education and a writing career in the East. But pulling himself up by his bootstraps messed with his heart. This book is what happened when he finally went back to see the folks he left behind.

The Story

Hamilton (the hero—basically Garland himself) grows up moving from farm to farm across the Middle Border during the late 1800s. Each move is a fresh, brutal start. His father is a hardnosed pioneer who believes a man is measured by his plowed acres. His mother is quieter, mourning the loss of a cultured, easier life. The family battles blizzards, locusts, crooked land agents, and the suffocating isolation of frontier loneliness. Just when farming starts to pay off, everything goes belly-up. A pensive young Hamilton decides to break away—not to show up his parents, but to see if all that hardship was really worth it. He lands in Boston, gets dazzled by culture and literature, then loads up on homesickness and goes back to the prairies.

Why You Should Read It

Most old-timey autobiographies make frontier life sound like one long, heroic episode of Little House on the Prairie. Not this one. Garland pulls zero punches about what it’s actually like. He talks about the terrible food, constant debt, and especially about his mother—a vibrant, talented woman wasted away by expectations and endless chores in a house without central heating. Reading this book, I got mad. Mad for his mom. But by the end, Garland also writes some of the most beautiful, quiet-is-messages descriptions of the tallgrass prairie I've ever read. The point is nostalgia can hurt as much as it helps. It's an Epic About Real Life, which beats a typical Epic every time.

Final Verdict

If you liked Little Women but wished Jo March didn't clean up her messes so fast, pick up this book. It's for anyone who has ever struggled with the question: 'Should I chase my dream, or stay close to home?' It's for wannabe homesteaders, descendants of farmers, and city folks who all wish the Wi-Fi connection was from a pioneer wife yelling from the attic. "A Son of the Middle Border" isn't footnotes and faded facts; it's an argument.