The Shadow World
HANNIBAL HAMLIN GARLAND was an American novelist, poet, essayist, short story writer, Georgist, and psychical researcher. A prolific writer, Garland continued to publish novels, short fiction, and essays well into his 80s.In 1917, he published his autobiography, A Son of the Middle Border. The book’s success prompted a sequel, A Daughter of the Middle Border, for which Garland won the 1922 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. Garland naturally became quite well known during his lifetime and had many friends in literary circles. He was made a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1918.
"The Shadow World" was first published in 1908 by Hamlin Garland, who was known for his fiction works involving farmers and the hardships of agrarian life, such as "Main-Traveled Roads" (1891), and who in 1929 moved to California from Massachusetts to pursue devotedly a paranormal phenomena, an area of study that he first took interest in 1891. Mr. Garland had had pointed out, in his Foreword, that "The Shadow World" is a "faithful record" of several psychic phenomena that he observed up to seventeen years before this book's publication. This is pretty much the synopsis for the entire book, but it was done with a novelist's style.
The author shared his experiences, in a first-person perspective, during his numerous séances with both "professional" and "amateur" mediums as well as all the noted physical phenomena, such as furniture and other objects movements, etc. It sure is an interesting reading of its time.
After moving to Hollywood, California, in 1929, he devoted his remaining years to investigating psychic phenomena, an enthusiasm he first undertook in 1891. In his final book, The Mystery of the Buried Crosses (1939), he tried to defend such phenomena and prove the legitimacy of psychic mediums.
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