Hamlin Garland Papers: Collection Highlights from USC Libraries Special Collections
The Hamlin Garland papers consist of correspondence, manuscripts, notebooks, photographs, and memorabilia, by and about the American realist writer. The collection holds close to 10,000 of Garland’s letters, which are now digitized and available for online public access via the USC Digital Library. Garland’s literary notebooks and manuscripts--with the author’s revisions--are also included, documenting the early working stages of Garland’s autobiographies and memoirs, fiction, plays, poetry, published articles, and lectures. The Garland papers also contain the typescripts, notebooks, interview transcripts, correspondence, and research material created by Garland for his biography of Ulysses S. Grant published in 1898. Lastly, the collection holds hundreds of the Garland family’s photographs and memorabilia dating as early as the 1850s.
Among the items featured in the display are letters and signed portraits to Garland from J. M. Barrie, George Bernard Shaw, Edith Wharton, and Walt Whitman. Also included are photographs documenting his 1898 travels through the Klondike region of northwestern Canada during the Alaska Gold Rush; drawings and prints by Constance Garland (Hamlin’s youngest daughter), who illustrated many of her father’s works and designed the bookplate that would be stamped inside each of the books in the Garland family’s extensive library; and materials related to two of the subjects that Garland researched and wrote about extensively: Ulysses S. Grant and psychical investigations (paranormal events and individuals claiming to be psychics).
Read on to learn more about the main themes of the exhibition.
Note: This exhibition was on display in Special Collections in 2018.
