MOBILE DIGITAL LIBRARY - SOCIETY OF YOUNG NIGERIAN ...

about sixteen, he became a pupil at the Cedar Valley Seminary, Osage, Iowa, though heworked on a farm during six months of the year. He graduated in 1881 from this schooland for a year tramped through the eastern states. His people having settled in BrownCounty, Dakota, he drifted that way in the spring of 1883 and took up a claim inMcPherson County, where he lived for a year on the unsurveyed land, making studies ofthe plains country, which were of great value to him later. The Moccasin Ranch andseveral of his short stories resulted from this experience.In the fall of 1884 he sold his claim and returned to the East, to Boston, intending toqualify himself for teaching. He soon found a helpful friend in Professor Moses TrueBrown, and became a pupil, and a little later an instructor, in the Boston School ofOratory. During years from 1885 to 1889 he taught private classes in English andAmerican literature, and lectured in and about Boston on Browning, Shakespeare, thedrama, etc., writing and studying meanwhile in the public library. In Boston he made theacquaintance of Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Dean Howells, Edward Everett Hale,Edwin Booth, and other leaders in literature and art.Mr. Garland wrote his stories from first-hand experience with men under certain typicalAmerican conditions. His stories of Boy Life on the Prairie and of Main-Traveled Roadsare grim stories of farm life in the West. They portray the conditions under which peoplelived on the prairies only a generation or two ago. He shows us that men may becometrue and strong because of their battle with such conditions. His books are as truly