Customer Reviews

Main-Travelled Roads

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Hamlin captures the essence of American Realism. The vividly painted scenes full of grit and labor keep this book moving. The characters are solid and provide the reader with a painfully honest view of life and love at the turn of the century. A necessary book for any decent collection of American Realism. Escape into the main traveled roads of humanity!

Garland is an expert at capturing local color. This collection of short stories shows the brutal reality of farm and rural life in the Midwest. His characters are thrown around in the cruel world and have no real way of escaping. His women characters are strong and hold their own in world dominated by hard working men. This book shows how it was like to live in the West one hundred years ago.

Garland captures the American West as it was at the end of the 19th Century. This collection of shorts stories is a slice of life in rural America. Garland is a true local colorist who portrays real, hard working farmers and the struggle to survive in the harsh landscape of the Midwest. Who is a true Naturalist who shows the brutal reality of American life and the lack of control people had on the conditions of their lives. These stories take you into the hardships of the countryfolk of one hundred years ago.

This Perennial Classic edition of Main-Travelled Roads gives the text of the 1930 edition, which contained the six stories of the original 1891 edition as well as the six stories added in subsequent editions (see below), an introduction by William Dean Howell and the author's Preface to the 1922 edition.

The original 1891 edition, published by The Arena Publishing Compny and subtitled "Six Mississippi Valley Stories," contained these stories: "A Branch Road," "Up the Coule" (the spelling was changed later to Coule and then to Cooly), "Among the Corn-Rows," "The Return of a Private," "Under the Lions Paw," and "Mrs. Ripley's Trip." The 1893 edition, copyrighted by The Century Company, added an introduction by William Dean Howells, and three stories: "The Creamery Man," "A Day's Pleasure," and "Uncle Ethan Ripley." In 1899, The Macmillan Company bought the contract for Main-Travelled Roads and brought out a new, illustrated edition, to which two stories were added: "Gods Ravens" and "A Good Fellow's Wife." In 1909 Harper & Brothers (later Harper & Row) purchased the contract for the book and in a 1922 edition published the eleven stories and an introduction by Hamlin Garland. In 1930 Harpers published the book in its final form, with revisions made by the author, with the earlier introductions by Howells and Garland, with illustrations by Constance Garland, and with a twelfth and final story, "The Fireplace" (which had originally appeared in the December 1906 Delineator).
--- from book's End Notes (There are no illustrations in this edition)

Main-Travelled Road by Hamlin Garland depicts the Midwest -- Iowa, Wisconsin, South Dakota-- during the 1890's. These stories tell us a bit of how the Midwest Aesthetic of plain spoken, hard working people that is the stereotype of the Midwest today came about. Garland was an early realist writer who really understood the beauty and difficulty of being an early Midwesterner.

This copy of the novel is so full of typographical errors that it is, at times, virtually unreadable. Given that Garland is supposed to be capturing the local flavor, it is imperative to know exactly how words are spelled. But I counted at least 24 typos on one page (page 27) and there is a mysterious page break on page 29. I'm reading this text academically but it is, in my estimation, basically garbage. Read it online; don't waste your money on supporting this intolerably bad editing.