Hamlin Garland was a turn of the century son of America's rural western farmland, a gifted writer who realistically portrayed the lives of the frontier farmers. The farmer tended to be an idealized figure in early America, hard working, self-sufficient worker of the land. Reality was something else. Garland grew up on a mid-western farm, and watched his parents toil endlessly and with little reward. Their journey through life, he once wrote, brought them "only toil and deprivation." Garland wrote realistic fiction about farm life, and later, autobiographical accounts of his own early life. Once he became an adult, Garland moved east, became a teacher and a writer, and while coming into a considerable sum of money, never forgot his roots. He became a passionate advocate of land reform as a means of improving the lot of those whose hard existence he understood. Garland is better remembered for autobiographies of his earlier days, but in 1928, he published one of his life after moving east, Back-Trailers from the Middle Border. In it, he describes his associations with many important names of the time, such as Theodore Roosevelt, George Bernard Shaw, and Rudyard Kipling, as well as his own honors, including a Pulitzer Prize. Item 235. $150.

Items 437-439 are first edition, first issues of three Steinbeck works, The Grapes of Wrath ($3,000), Of Mice and Men ($6,000), and To A God Unknown ($14,000). The latter is one of just 598 copies published.

Chapel Hill Rare Books may be found online at www.chapelhillrarebooks.com, telephone 919-929-8351.