A Son of the Middle Border: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

A Son of the Middle Border, credited to Hamlin Garland, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of A Son of the Middle Border by Hamlin Garland. In all the region of autobiography, so far as I know it, I do not know quite the like of Mr. Garland's story of his life, and I should rank it with the very greatest of that kind in literature. . . . It is the poet who sees the vast scale of human struggle with nature or the things she will withhold unless they are forced from her by man's tireless toil and mighty mechanism, and in the vision he knows a battle-joy as distinctive of this Son of the Middle Border as his fidelity to the sordid and squalid details of the campaign, or his exultation of the beauty of the West which he has so passionately hated and finally so passionately loves. As you read the story of his life you realize it the memorial of a generation, of a whole order of American experience; as you review it you perceive it an epic of such mood and make as has not been imagined before.(Introduction by William Dean Howells, New York Times review, August 26, 1917)

Recording facts

• Recording title: A Son of the Middle Border
• Author credits: Hamlin Garland
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 35
• Listed recording duration: 15:31:14

Catalogue topics

• autobiography

Opening tracks: first 24 of 35

1. 01 - Home from the War — 24:41
2. 02 - The McClintocks — 24:13
3. 03 - The Home in the Coulee — 31:09
4. 04 - Father Sells the Farm — 15:23
5. 05 - The Last Threshing in the Coulee — 18:26
6. 06 - David and His Violin — 16:48
7. 07 - Winnesheik 'Woods and Prairie Lands' — 22:16
8. 08 - We Move Again — 12:55
9. 09 - Our First Winter on the Prairie — 28:22
10. 10 - The Homestead on the Knoll — 15:04
11. 11 - School Life — 18:26
12. 12 - Chores and Almanacs — 16:52
13. 13 - Boy Life on the Prairie — 40:19
14. 14 - Wheat and the Harvest — 34:27
15. 15 - Harriet Goes Away — 24:03
16. 16 - We Move to Town — 32:09
17. 17 - A Taste of Village Life — 29:29
18. 18 - Back to the Farm — 34:59
19. 19 - End of School Days — 25:32
20. 20 - The Land of the Dakotas — 27:20
21. 21 - The Ant and the Grasshopper — 39:13
22. 22 - We Discover New England — 24:30
23. 23 - Coasting Down Mt Washington — 16:25
24. 24 - Tramping, New York, Washington, and Chicago — 28:26

Listen to this recording

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Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.