Other Main-Travelled Roads

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Harte, in the New England Magazine August , concluded that the stories in the volume were "as realistic as anything written by Ibsen; but at the same time, they have a more dramatic quality, and are besides relieved with an undercurrent of humor, which makes the realism, true realism. In a far-ranging review in which several of the stories came in for specific comment, Howells observed:. These stories are full of the bitter and burning dust, the foul and trampled slush of the common avenues of life: If anyone is still at a loss to account for that uprising of the farmers in the West, which is the translation of the Peasants' War into modern and republican terms, let him read Main-Travelled Roads and he will begin to understand, unless, indeed, Mr.

Garland is painting the exceptional rather than the average.

The stories are full of those gaunt, grim, sordid, pathetic, ferocious figures whom our satirists find so easy to caricature as Hayseeds, and whose blind groping for fairer conditions is so grotesque to the newspapers and so menacing to the politicians. They feel that something is wrong, and they know that the wrong is not theirs. The type caught in Mr. Garland's book is not pretty; it is ugly and often ridiculous; but it is heart-breaking in its rude despair. Not all critics were so warm in their praise of Garland's work.

Main-Travelled Roads

Many criticized the balance and tone of his stories, while others questioned their accuracy and representativeness. Still others felt that he too often emphasized the negative. Even Howells cautioned that Garland "still has to learn that though the thistle is full of an unrecognized poetry, the rose has poetry too, that even overpraise cannot spoil" p. A reviewer in The Nation 13 August argued: Descriptions of the same uninviting interiors, the same birds and insects, finally produce an impression of monotony and mannerism.

Garland would doubtless disclaim any intention of showing the whole truth in his stories, and put them forward only as dashes of shadow to modify the general picture of rural life in America. Despite the many positive reviews of his work during this period, Garland was distressed by the negative reaction, especially from critics and reviewers in the West. He later recalled, in A Son of the Middle Border: I had the foolish notion that the literary folk of the West would take local pride in the color of my work, and to find myself execrated by nearly every critic as "a bird willing to foul his own nest" was an amazement.

Editorials and criticisms poured into the office, all written to prove that my pictures of the middle border were utterly false. Statistics were employed to show that pianos and Brussels carpets adorned almost every Iowa farmhouse. Tilling the prairie was declared to be "the noblest vocation in the world, not in the least like the pictures this eastern author has drawn of it. The stories in Main-Travelled Roads contain a number of themes, including daily lives spun out in hopeless toiling tragedy against the backdrop of natural glories, the irrelevancy of romantic love when set against the drudgery of farmwork, the ambivalence of isolation and companionship, the desire to leave the land versus the resulting guilt of leaving loved ones behind, the gap between those who have and those who have not, and loss of innocence.

Garland's focus on these themes, especially the theme of lost innocence, is significant for a number of reasons. For one, it seems clear by his own admission in the foreword to his edition of the collection that his stories represented a deeply personal exploration of his own lost innocence, in his return after several years of living in the East to his parents' South Dakota home. For another, Garland increasingly saw his own loss of innocence mirrored in the passing of a more innocent time in America. His exploration of this theme consistently reflects his newly acquired beliefs after his exposure to the works of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer , and his conclusions therefore carry a weight that is at once literary, sociological, and political in his implied understanding that survival for his characters must include not simply a loss of innocence but acceptance of the reality that it may be necessary to leave a hostile environment rather than attempt often in futility to adapt to it.

Other Main-Travelled Roads by Hamlin Garland

Interestingly, however, Garland often is as concerned with his own version of "remembrance of things past" as he is with what will happen after the loss of innocence to the characters and to the land. While some of the stories that comprise the original edition of Main-Travelled Roads contain flaws, the book as a whole is a powerful and evocative treatment of western farm life.

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In it, Garland uses the apt metaphor of the western road as the symbolic structural center, providing a prefatory statement to the book itself that sets the dominant tone and hints at what is to come, followed by epigraphs before each story to achieve unity. In story after story, including "The Return of a Private," "A Branch Road," "Up the Coulee," and "Under the Lion's Paw," one sees characters on the move, sometimes attempting to establish a better life somewhere else, sometimes returning to the land they left.

Occasionally the journey is merely one for a few days' respite from the toils of farm life, as in "Mrs. Ripley's Trip" or "A Day's Pleasure" added in the edition. But Garland makes a central point in all of this movement: While several stories, particularly "Up the Coulee," "A Branch Road," and "The Return of a Private," suggest that inequities in the economic system are responsible for the farmers' plight, "Under the Lion's Paw," the best-known and most widely reprinted story in the collection, is the only one that explicitly makes use of the single-tax doctrine.

Other Main-Travelled Roads by Hamlin Garland

The story was written as an illustration of Henry George 's thesis of the harmful social effects of the unearned increment, and Garland habitually used the text when he was lecturing and campaigning for Populist candidates in In the story, the Haskins family, forced to settle in Kansas because of the high price of land in the East, is plagued by grasshoppers and forced to move again.

Aided by a hospitable family, they rent a farm in Iowa from Jim Butler, a villainous land speculator. After three years of hard labor, Haskins is ready to buy, but Butler doubles the price because of the improvements Haskins himself made upon the land. The banker, who has done nothing, will profit, and an enraged Haskins determines to murder Butler. However, Haskins refrains from carrying out his purpose when he sees his own child, and though crushed under the economic system, he resolves to renew his struggle for her sake.

A sense of guilt also permeates several stories in the collection, a theme that unquestionably resulted from Garland's personal guilt over leaving his family, especially his mother, and watching their plight from a distance. In "Up the Coulee," the most powerful and perhaps the most autobiographical story in Main-Travelled Roads, Garland depicts the return of Howard McLane, a successful actor, to Wisconsin from the East to visit his mother and his brother Grant. After first being awed by the beauty of nature upon his return, Howard is overwhelmed by the irrelevancy of this beauty in the lives of his family.

When he confronts Grant and his family, he finds them living in poverty on a small, unproductive farm, for the family property has been sold to pay a mortgage. The perspective of the husbands and men are included as well, Garland repeatedly employs an omniscient narrator, but the thoughts and feelings of the women is a particular highlight in a collection filled with highlights.

The marriage dynamic and the woman's central place as a leader in the frontier family is a recurring motif throughout a majority of the stories. By expanding the perspective and moving away from the male viewpoint, the reader is shown a more rich and thorough landscape of the intimate social structure of the era. In short, the focus upon perspectives, other than a strictly male worldview, is a strength of the many strong stories in this collection. This was an interesting book.

It was written in the 's and is a collection of short stories about rural life, primarily in Wisconsin if I remember correctly. The stories all seemed to have a sort of bleakness to them, but a few have what could possibly be considered happy endings, if you squint hard and force yourself to think past the actual end of the story. Still, t This was an interesting book. A couple things to consider Much of the dialogue throughout the book is written in a strong vernacular dialect that can be hard to grasp at first.

It took a while before I was able to read it without having to think too hard about translating the words I was reading.

Finally, the free Kindle edition I read contained so many typos that it actually started to make me cross by the end. I get that it's a free book, but it's pretty obvious that whoever did the proofing wasn't really reading or they'd have caught most of the errors. Anyway, it was interesting and I'm glad I read it. Sep 05, Bob rated it really liked it Recommended to Bob by: Garland's vision of American farm life in the mid-West during the later years of the 19th century is -both harsh and captivating.

Other Main-Travelled Roads

His characters are well-drawn and believable, even if Garland's prose is a bit dated, and the support they demonstrate for one another in the hard scrabble life they have chosen is - like the hurricane in Houston - a reminder that in difficult times people sometimes overcome their selfish proclivities and reach out to one another as human beings. Detailed Prose that left something lacking The details of the landscape was detailed to the point of dragging down the story, though it did paint a beautiful picture through words.

For me, however, I prefer stories to be complete, even if the ending isn't a happy one. Many of these short stories ended so abruptly that it made me think it was unfinished. That need for finality was left unsated. It's worth the read, but it most definitely isn't one of my favorites. Kind of depressing, but yet interesting read because of the time period it was written. He clearly did not like the farming community, and explains that in the forward of the book. Ended on a bright note though. Jul 04, Cleokatra rated it really liked it Shelves: I don't usually enjoy short stories.

This book was okay. I enjoyed some of the stories more than others. View all 7 comments. In The American s , a book I'm also working through, Larzer Ziff states that Hamlin Garland considered himself more a reformer than a writer of prose. While I agree that readers are more likely to remember these stories for their unflinching depictions of the United States' rural poor than for their lovely imagery and figurative language, I think it'd be unfair to say they aren't well-written. The standouts are "Up the Coulee," in which a New York actor returns to the family farm after severa In The American s , a book I'm also working through, Larzer Ziff states that Hamlin Garland considered himself more a reformer than a writer of prose.

The standouts are "Up the Coulee," in which a New York actor returns to the family farm after several years away; "Under the Lion's Paw," in which Garland finally dramatizes the kind of morally bankrupt mortgage man his other stories had condemned only abstractly; and "Mrs. Ripley's Trip" and "Uncle Ethan Ripley," in which we meet the book's most endearing pair of rough-skinned midwestern spouses. These stories, which the author intended to do for the country's agrarian poor his parents included what Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives had done for the residents of urban tenements, remind us that even today there are actual people who sweat over the crisp apples we city-dwellers chomp and the ethanol we pump into our SUVs.

They remind us that poverty wears many guises. That said, however, Garland's cultural superiority, which comes through most obviously in his rendering of poor Scandinavian farmers as inevitably dumber, meaner, and smellier than the naturalized Americans who live around them, makes even strong story-telling uncomfortable. I'd recommend the stories I mentioned above to anybody, and the whole book for readers looking for a glimpse into the hardships and prejudices of the late nineteenth-century American farmer. Mar 11, Tony rated it really liked it Shelves: Garland was born in a log cabin in Wisconsin in His family later moved to Iowa, where he attended the Cedar Valley Seminary.

After this, he helped his family move to South Dakota, where they staked a claim on some farmland. Garland, however, had greater ambitions. He wanted to become a teacher. He went to Boston to attend the Boston School of Oratory. He later became a lecturer there and at other local institutions. He made a trip back h Garland, Hamlin. He made a trip back home to visit his family in and He also managed to visit Wisconsin and Iowa. These eleven short stories in this collection were the results of those trips. He saw the struggle that stake-holders went through on a daily basis, and the inevitability of their never leaving the land to find satisfaction elsewhere.

Some of these stories are very good; others are so-so. They are all full of sentimentality and pathos. He later moved to L. Mar 12, Kunjan Patel rated it really liked it Shelves: Main-travelled roads was one of the better books I have read. Of all the aspects of the novel, I love the realistic viewpoint of the novel. For example, in the short story, Up in the Coolly, Garland does not portray the life of the farmer as glorious, describing the individuality of the farmer; rather, in the story Garland portrays the life of the farm and Grant, the farmer, as a toilsome, underpaid and underappreciated job like many of the midwestern farms in the late-eighteenth century.

I also Main-travelled roads was one of the better books I have read. I also like the short-story format of the novel where every story focuses on midwestern farmers and farms but every short story streamlines its focus. For example, in the short story Up in the Coolly, Garland focuses on the cities' lack of interest and help toward the deteriorating condition of the farm while Garland focuses on the hardlife and the tenant farming effects during the short story Under the Lion's Paw.

I thought Garland's novel is a great attempt to debunk the myth that farms were always glorious and expose the toil and hardship faced by American farmers at the turn of the nineteenth century. I personally like Garland's streamlined approach with every short story, and I also enjoy realistic novels. It was a very good book overall, and I would recommend it.

May 30, Humphrey rated it liked it. Glad to have finally read this. There are a couple impressive stories in here: The themes that run throughout the collection - the brutal hardships of rural life, the cruel circumstances that bind individuals to such a life and the conflict between duty and dreams - are brought out most fully here.

The stories that follow these first two certainly aren't bad; they read well and often re Glad to have finally read this. The stories that follow these first two certainly aren't bad; they read well and often reveal interesting aspects of rural life on the eve of the twentieth century, but they feel rather ordinary in comparison. First published in , this collection of stories challenges beliefs about life on the frontier that persist in the collective imagination still today.

Set variously in the upper Mississippi Valley and as far west as Dakota, they cast the homesteading farm family in a harsh light robbed of any myth or romance. While modernization in later years may remove some of the back-breaking labor of working the soil and tending livestock, Garland portrays the grim reality of daily toil for the first gen First published in , this collection of stories challenges beliefs about life on the frontier that persist in the collective imagination still today. While modernization in later years may remove some of the back-breaking labor of working the soil and tending livestock, Garland portrays the grim reality of daily toil for the first generation of homesteaders who settled on the land following the Civil War.

More at my blog. Jan 17, Daniel Jr. On the Kindle, and I'm mostly listening to the stories when I walk and on my commute to work.

Really liking it so far. I have a soft-spot for "pioneer" authors, Willa Cather and Ole Rolvaag in particular, so I picked up this little collection by Hamlin Garland with high hopes. But his prose was a little cumberous, and I was left with a foul impression of bigotry. I'm probably just being hypersensitive because of a bias in favor of my own Scandinavian ancestry, but his tone and characterizations of the "stupid Norwegians" was a I have a soft-spot for "pioneer" authors, Willa Cather and Ole Rolvaag in particular, so I picked up this little collection by Hamlin Garland with high hopes.

I'm probably just being hypersensitive because of a bias in favor of my own Scandinavian ancestry, but his tone and characterizations of the "stupid Norwegians" was a turn off. Altogether, it was an okay read, but nothing special. Jul 14, Bob rated it liked it Shelves: I first read this book in high school, and have read it every other decade or so since. There is only one thing I remember about it now. Garland writes that a man sitting alone in the middle of the bench when driving a buckboard is unfriendly and doesn't want company, but if he sits to either side of the bench, then it is a silent invitation for a pedestrian going his way to jump up and share the ride.

For some reason I've always remembered that.

Feb 08, Penny rated it really liked it. Garland's style of writing but his stories for the most part are grim. He lived and that time period is reflected in his writing. In his foreword he speaks of "a record of the privations and hardships of the men and women who subdued the midland wilderness and prepared the way for the present golden age of agriculture. Jun 02, Ms Kathleen rated it it was amazing. I first read this book of short stories in college many moons ago. From time to time I would think about some of the stories that for some reason left a powerful impact upon me.

I found another copy a few years ago and from time to time I give the book another read. Mar 05, Mike rated it really liked it Shelves: A collection that is mostly hit-or-miss, but the hits are very remarkable. Although "Under the Lion's Paw" tends to get anthologized most often, I think Garland is at his peak in "Up the Coulee," with its fine balance of impressionism and mud-caked, life-on-the-farm realism. What Garland termed "veritism.

Nov 06, Thomas rated it really liked it.

Mar 02, Barbara rated it really liked it Shelves: Interesting series of stories of early farming days in the midwest. Stories of hardship and some humorous tales as well.

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