A Summer to Be: A Memoir by the Daughter of Hamlin Garland

In A Summer to Be, Isabel Garland Lord writes an honest and revealing memoir of growing up in the shadow of her famous father, the pioneering realist and Pulitzer Prize–winning author Hamlin Garland. Lord unveils a hitherto unknown side of her father—the intensely loving, domineering patriarch whose deep love for his eldest daughter led him to change the trajectory of his career even as that love impeded his daughter’s own independence. Written in the 1960s, A Summer to Be movingly weaves the story of Lord’s own coming of age that is also a snapshot of American literary culture during the first decades of the twentieth century. Part memoir and part autobiography, A Summer to Be records a daughter’s gradual emergence from her devoted and possessive father; it is a story full of moments of revelation and intrigue, betrayal and guilt, and ultimately the joy of self-discovery.

Isabel Garland Lord (1904–88) had a stage and lecture-circuit career and produced a half-dozen books, several stage plays, and a musical. Keith Newlin is a professor and chair of the Department of English at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. He is the author of Hamlin Garland: A Life (Nebraska 2008). Victoria Doyle-Jones, Lord’s second niece, enjoyed a long career in support of science education, including serving as CEO of the University of California’s White Mountain Research Station facilities. Now retired, she is involved in a variety of volunteer projects.