Hamlin Garland
Wisconsin
The writer Hamlin Garland was born just outside West Salem on the fourteenth of September, eighteen sixty. He became one of America's great chroniclers of the hard, unglamorous lives of Midwestern farmers, writing with a plainness that broke from the romantic fiction of his day.
In eighteen ninety-three he came home, buying a place here for his aging parents, a study for his own work, and a summer home for his wife and young daughters. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in nineteen eighteen, and in nineteen twenty-two his memoir, A Daughter of the Middle Border, won the Pulitzer Prize.
He immortalized this rolling coulee country in book after book. When he died in nineteen forty, his ashes were laid to rest in the family plot at the Neshonoc cemetery nearby.
