Main-Travelled Roads

by Hamlin Garland, William Dean Howells, Joseph B. McCullough

Overview

Main-Travelled Roads contains eleven stories in this expanded and revised 1922 edition of an undisputed American classic.Although Garland paints no pretty pictures, he offers exhilarating moments in the lives of these farm people and never ignores the strength of individual will.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780803270589
Publisher:	UNP - Bison Books
Publication date:	11/01/1995
Pages:	247
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.66(d)

About the Author

Introducing this Bison Books edition is Joseph B. McCullough, the author of Hamlin Garland and coeditor of Selected Letters of Hamlin Garland, also published by the University of Nebraska Press. He is a professor of English at the University of Nevada.

Editorial Reviews

"Was it not in Garland that American farmers first talked like farmers? Was it not Garland who among the very first dedicated his career to realism? Was it not Garland who, almost alone in the eighties, sat in the Boston Public Library writing out of his loneliness and poverty those first realistic stories that were to guide others to a new literature in America? It is true."—Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature

Alfred Kazin

"The animating power of Main-Travelled Roads lies in its ability to balance heartbreaking depiction of rural hardship with endearing testimony to the small joys and bonds of community that persist in spite of it.... Main-Travelled Roads testifies to the proverbial middleness that continues to characterize the Midwest. Garland’s characters acutely experience the push and pull of departure and return, the compromise between individual aspiration and communal obligation, the attempt to find meaning in the tension between the beauty of the landscape and the banality of labor." — Alex Zweber Leslie, Cleveland Review of Books

From the Publisher