Main-Travelled Roads

by Hamlin Garland, Brianne Jaquette (Introduction)

Overview

Main-Travelled Roads collects 11 short stories, originally published in 1891, set in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota, or what Hamlin Garland called the “Middle Border.” Depicting an agrarian life of exploitation, misogyny, and poverty, Garland's radical, realist stories refute romantic conceptions of the rural Midwest. Unrelenting yet strangely hopeful in its view of how things ought to be, this collection is gripping, hard-hitting, and surprisingly beautiful.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781948742030
Publisher:	Belt Publishing
Publication date:	06/01/2018
Series:	Belt Revivals
Edition description:	None
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.10(d)

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