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The Clarence Darrow Letters

Hamlin Garland to Clarence Darrow, December 14, 1904


Click on the image to download as a PDF from the Web Archive. A transcription of the letter is on the right.

West Salem Wis

Dear Mr. Darrow:


I have read your book with pleasure and pain - it is so true - so unflinchingly true and so sad! We all live through the experiences you have so simply told - your pathos your humor come very close to me. I too look back from a "gray world" to a land of wondrous sunshine on the prairie - and last year my father and I went back to our Iowa home to suffer - as it turned


the same disillusionment as that chronicled in your book. Our neighbors were mainly dead - My playmates were stooped and sullen men who looked at me with a kind of elemental questioning of the [?] - Yes "farmington" is worth while and there is a bigger work in you. This is but a first exercise sketch. - Let me see you when I return to Chicago next week - I want to tell you that this is a big theme beautifully treated as far as it goes and it should go farther -

Mrs. Garland joins me in liking the book.

Hamlin Garland

Dec 14
Hamlin Garland
West Salem, Wis.






Clarence Darrow, Esq.

Chicago

Ill.

[M.?] McClung

CHICAGO, ILL
DEC 15
8: 30 PM
1904

Jessie Budd