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

Clarence Darrow, Esq.

Chicago

Ill.

[M.?] McClung