Hamlin Garland. Main-Travelled Roads. 1891, reprint New York: New American Library, 1962. SUMMARY OF THE BOOK The publication of six original stories in Main-Travelled Roads in 1891 launched the literary career of thirty-one-year-old Hamlin Garland. Over time, expanded by five additional stories, the book emerged as a mi nor American classic. Its setting was what was referred to at the turn of the century as the “Middle Border,” straddling the boundary between the Middle West and the West and in cluding places where he had lived growing up in western Wisconsin, Iowa, and Dakota Territory near Aberdeen. The original impulse for writing these stories was a trip Garland, an adoptive Bostonian, took back to visit his parents on their farm. His main observations on that j ourney concerned the oppressive economic and social conditions existing on the frontier, especially the drudgery and isolation suffered by his moth er and other rural women. These images worked their way into the stories he wrote soon afterwards. While the pieces he wrote made for searing and dramatic indictments of life on the Middle Border, however, they did not necessarily present a fair and balanced view. It certainly is true that conditions there were harsh, toilsome, and precarious, but there were many co mpensations provided by life in the region that Garland failed to celebra
