PRAISE
"A Summer to Be is an
intimate glimpse at Garland's life during the twentieth century when the
radical realist became a conservative arbiter of literary standards and
when the roving bachelor became a loving father and a controlling
patriarch. . . . In editing this work, Keith Newlin has performed a
great literary service, his Introduction and notes providing the context
that unifies the work." --Roark Mulligan, Studies in American
Naturalism
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an exceprt
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A Summer to Be
A Memoir by the Daughter of Hamlin Garland
By Isabel Garland Lord
Edited
and Introduction by Keith Newlin
Foreword
by Victoria Doyle-Jones
University
of Nebraska Press, 2010
ISBN 9780803232433
ABOUT
THE BOOK
In
A Summer to Be, Isabel Garland Lord writes an honest and
revealing memoir of what it was like to grow up in the shadow of her
famous father, the pioneering realist Hamlin Garland, whose first
collection of stories, Main-Travelled Roads (1891), shocked the
nation in its unabashed portrait of harsh Midwestern farms.
Lord unveils a hitherto unknown side of her father—the
intensely-loving, domineering patriarch whose deep love for his eldest
daughter led him to change the trajectory of his career even as that
love impeded his daughter’s independence.
It is the story of a girl brought up among her father’s famous
friends, enjoying all the advantages of celebrity even as she rebelled
against her father’s loving domination.
Written in the 1960s and now published for the first time, A
Summer to Be movingly weaves a story of Lord’s own coming of age
that is also a snapshot of American literary culture of the first
decades of the twentieth century. Part memoir and part autobiography, A Summer to Be records a daughter’s gradual emergence from her
devoted and possessive father; it is a story full of moments of
revelation and intrigue, betrayal and guilt, and ultimately the joy of
self-discovery.
Cover
of 2008 Whitston edition
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