SOURCE: "Hamlin Garland," in The Economic Novel in America, 1942. Reprint by Octagon Books, 1964, pp. 148-83. Originally published by the University of North Carolina Press.

Taylor was an American critic and educator whose books include A Literary History of the United States (1948). In the following excerpt, Taylor traces the economic and social influences that shaped Garland's fiction. The critic also offers an explanation for why Garland stopped including reform topics in his writing, arguing that by the mid-1890s, "the cultural foundation on which [Garland had hitherto stood was dissolving. "]

More systematic than the scattered deliverances of Mark Twain, and of more artistic importance than the now forgotten novels of several score journalists and reformers, is the work of Hamlin Garland. With Garland, both as man and as artist, economics and economic reform were, over a period of some ten years, a major interest. Prior to, and during, this...