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There’s a new book out about West Salem’s most famous native son. “Hamlin Garland: A Life,” only the second biography of the novelist, writer and essayist ever published — the first came out 40 years ago — required almost a decade of research and writing by its author, Keith Newlin.

A professor of English at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, Newlin visited West Salem three times to gather material. Newlin, who admits to becoming obsessed with Garland, first set foot in West Salem during the late 1980s.

“I was working on my dissertation then,” Newlin said.

He decided to write Garland’s biography in 1999 and visited twice after that, the most recent visit during last year’s Garland Days. “I wish I could have spent more time but I had to catch a plane — everyone was very gracious to me,” Newlin said.

His host during his visits was retired history teacher Errol Kindschy. “He’s been very helpful to me — I got the extensive tour and came away impressed with how much was there,” Newlin said.

“We’ve taken him out to the graveyard, to the home in (Onalaska’s) Greens Coulee and several other sites where Garland’s stories occurred,” Kindschy said.

Newlin had praise for Kindschy’s book on West Salem history, “Leonard’s Dream.” “That book helped a lot in putting Garland’s time in West Salem into its proper context for me,” Newlin said.

Although Garland was born in West Salem in 1860 and spent early boyhood years in Greens Coulee in Onalaska, his family moved away when he was 8. Garland’s father, Dick, had a lifelong case of wanderlust that led to the family being frequently uprooted. Although he lived all over the Midwest, and later on in big cities like Boston, New York and Chicago, Garland always seemed to return to West Salem.

In 1893, he bought his then-aging parents a home in West Salem. After his mother died and his father remarried and moved out, Garland used the home as a summer residence between 1901 and 1915 (his primary residence was in Chicago). The home nearly burned down in 1912. “Errol (Kindschy) showed me the burned timbers on one tour of the house,” Newlin said.

Garland had a reputation as a tactless man who was occaasionally lacking in the social graces. Whether Newlin would have liked Garland had he known him is debatable.

“Well, I guess it depends on what decade you’re talking about,” Newlin said. “Early in life he was very garrulous and obstreperous. He was certainly not hesitant to give his opinion. He had enemies, but he had a lot of friends, too — there was obviously something about him that people liked.”

As a biographer Newlin had one huge advantage. The National Endowment for the Arts provided a year’s stipend so that he could work on the book without having to support himself. “I had the great gift of a year’s leave,” Newlin said. That allowed him to completely immerse himself in Garland’s life.

“As a biographer, that is the way to go, because so much of what you do is in context,” Newlin said.

Newlin says he became so immersed in Garland’s life that it was as if he was living it. “My wife would interrupt me and ask ‘Where are you now?” and I would say, ‘It’s March of 1893 and I’m living in Chicago,” he said.

Among the surprises from his West Salem research was the revelation that Garland was not a great parent. “His daughter’s (Mary Isabel) memoir was very interesting. I learned how bad a father he was,” Newlin said. “He favored Mary Isabel (his other daughter was Constance) so much that he gave her a $100-a-month allowance for most of her life.”

Mary Isabel’s memoir was never published during her lifetime (both she and Constance died within a week of each other in 1988), but Newlin has edited “A Summer to Be: A Memoir of Hamlin Garland” and it, too, was published this year.

While poring over Garland’s letters and other accounts, Newlin admits to hoping he’d find something scandalous. “Biographers are snoops — we really want salacious material. I kept hoping for some wild, lurid affair, but it turned out this his wife (Zulime) was the one who had it,” Newlin said.

Still, there was plenty of drama in Garland’s life, and Newlin strives to help the reader understand both his strengths and his weaknesses. In 1922 Garland, a prolific writer, won the Pulitzer Prize for “Daughter of the Middle Border,” but Newlin said his best book was his 1917 autobiography, “Son of the Middle Border.”

“He was a great descriptive writer and the biography he did of Ulysses Grant earlier really helped him when he wrote about himself in “Son of the Middle Border.” Newlin said he believes “Son of the Middle Border” and then some of Garland’s short stories are the works that are least dated and most accessible to modern readers.