Main-Travelled Roads

by Hamlin Garland

Overview

This classic short story collection offers an unblinking portrait of the American Midwest during a time of intense change.

Originally published in 1891, Main-Travelled Roads includes eleven short stories set in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota, or the region of America Hamlin Garland called the “Middle Border.” Depicting an agrarian life of exploitation, misogyny, and poverty, Garland’s radical, realist stories—written in a mode he called “veritism”—refute romantic conceptions of the rural Midwest.

Unrelenting, yet infused with a hopeful vision of how things ought to be, this collection is gripping, hard-hitting, and surprisingly beautiful. Main-Travelled Roads was Garland’s first major success, a little-known classic of American literature and the Midwest.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781948742047
Publisher:	Arcadia Publishing SC
Publication date:	05/01/2024
Series:	Belt Revivals
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	353
Sales rank:	713,596
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Hamlin Garland was an American novelist, poet, essayist, and short story writer. He is best known for his fiction involving hard-working Midwestern farmers. Brianne Jaquette is a teacher and writer originally from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She has a PhD in English from the University of Missouri and is interested in the nineteenth century, regionalism, and literature.

Editorial Reviews

"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

"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