A BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

When about sixteen he became a pupil at the Cedar Valley Seminary at Osage, though working as usual on the farm during six months of each year. He graduated in 1881 from this school and for two years tramped through the Eastern States. His people having settled in Brown County, Dakota, he drifted that way in the spring of 1883, and took up a claim in McPherson County, where he lived for a year on the unsurveyed land.

In the fall of 1884 he sold his claim and returned to the East, to Boston, intending to further qualify himself for teaching. He found a helpful friend in Professor Moses True Brown of the Boston School of Oratory. He became a pupil and little later on an instructor in this school, and during 1885-6-7-8 and 9 taught he private classes in English and American Literature, lecturing in and about Boston on Browning, Shakespeare, The Drama, etc., writing and studying meanwhile in the public library.

In 1887 he revisited his people in Dakota, Iowa, and Wisconsin. He regards this trip as one marking an epoch in his life for he began to write his Mississippi Valley stories at once. He produced a score of poems and half as many stories of the prairies and the "Coolly County" in the winter of 1887-8. In 1891 he published "Main Travelled Roads." In ‘92 "Jason Edwards," "A Member of the Third House," and "A Spoil of Office"; ‘93 "Prairie Songs."

In 1891 he made a series of trips into the west and in 1892 gave up his home in Boston and took apartments in New York City for the winter. In 1893 he decided to make his literary headquarters in Chicago, and purchased a house in his native village, which has been his summer home ever since. His parents returned to West Salem to live with him, though his father continues still to manage a farm in Dakota.

In the spring of 1894 Mr. Garland published a volume of essays called "Crumbling Idols." In 1895 he completed "Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly," and entered upon the writing of a "Life of General Grant." This work consumed two years’ time and demanded much travel and personal research. In 1898 he published this biography and a third volume of short stories called "Wayside Courtship."

In 1898, immediately alter completing the Grant life, Mr. Garland went into the Yukon Valley overland. This trip consumed nearly six months and forms the basis of a volume called "The Trail of the Gold-Seekers." In 1899 he published "Boy-Life on the Prairie." In 1900 "The Eagles Heart." In April, 1901, his latest book, "Her Mountain Lover" appeared. In 1899 he married Zulime Taft, daughter of Professor Don Carlos Taft, (formerly Professor of Geology at Illinois State University) and sister of Lorado Taft the sculptor. Mr. Garland is a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and of the Players Club of New York City.

LECTURE ONE.—Prairie Song and Western Story, is a lecture depicting the old-time prairie farm life illustrated by readings from "Main Travelled Raods," "Boy Life on the Prairie," "Prairie Songs" and "Prairie Folks."

"Like James Whitcomb Riley and others of the younger group of poets and novelists Mr. Garland has the power to read his own work with dramatic fervor. He puts his characters before his audience, in these readings, with the same fidelity with which he writes.

"The hush at noon; the silence broken by sharp cries of tremolos of the birds; the strange dusks; the waving grasses; the stately corn; the figures of the gray wolf, the bison and the Indian slinking away, and the brave pioneer looming up in the horizon,—these and other aspects of the plains are exhibited. The effect of /he whole series of songs is like that of a loosely written but tremendous epic of the prairies."—BOSTON TRAVELLER.