No artist can be set apart from the developments and problems of his day, and so it was that Hamlin Garland, literary spokesman for the Midwestern farmers of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, was inevitably bound to portray his region with all of its economic, social, and political complexities. His work was destined to be influenced by the echoes of the Civil War, the immigration of both Americans and foreigners to a fertile, grain-producing country, and by all the problems of adjustment that faced this agrarian society.