Hamlin Garland and Frederick Philip Grove: Self-Conscious Chroniclers of the Pioneers

Hamlin Garland and Frederick Philip Grove each witnessed the end of the pioneer period in his own part of the North American West, and each self- consciously assumed the role of chronicler of the pioneer process. Critics of frontier and farm writing have proposed various reasons to account for novelists' taking up of this genre. Henry Nash Smith, the dean of these critics, portrays James Fenimore Cooper, the writers of dime novels and the other practitioners he discusses as both reacting to and propagating an aggregate of "myths" and "symbols" through which Americans viewed their West and themselves.1 Roy Meyer, discussing realistic fiction in The Middle Western Farm Novel, suggests that part of the reason for the rise of this genre lay in the improvements in rural education that created more potential novelists from farm backgrounds, though like Smith he views the audience as more important than the practitioners in creating the genre.2 Contem- porary Canadian prairie writers Margaret Laurence and Robert Kroetsch in an interesting "conversation" agree that they both write about the prairie because they need to record their own backgrounds and thus to create their own identities through their fiction.3 Smith's explanation is not pertinent to Garland and Grove, since Smith believes that his "myths" and "symbols" were exhausted by 1890 — when Garland was just turning to fiction and while Grove was still a child. Whether or not Smith was right in his cut-off date is a moot point here, though certainly the most important western writing after that date went in a different direction. Meyer's suggestion is no more useful, since Garland grew up before any improvements in rural education, while Grove was educated in Europe. Laurence and Kroetsch offer the most promis- ing suggestion in the search for identity, and the purpose of this paper is to show how for both Garland and Grove the search for identity demanded that they become chroniclers of the pioneers.