Main-Travelled Roads by Hamlin Garland

Midwestern farm tales not quite ready for rural realism

Hamlin Garland was one of the pioneers of the realist movement in American literature, along with his contemporary Stephen Crane. Garland’s particular area of expertise was writing stories of farmers and rural life in the Midwest. Raised on a farm himself, Garland moved on to the big cities of Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles, where he practiced his literary craft and eventually won a Pulitzer Prize, among other accolades. His first book of fiction, Main-Travelled Roads, a collection of 11 short stories, was published in 1891 and immediately established him as a successful man of letters.

Garland was born in the rolling prairie lands of southwestern Wisconsin near the village of West Salem, in the vicinity of La Crosse. Garland’s hometown was apparently the model for the fictional town of Bluff Siding, also near La Crosse, where several of these stories take place. A few of the stories have recurring characters that appear in loosely connected narratives, somewhat like Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. A few others take place in unspecified rural locations in what Garland would have called the West, but which we now think of as the Midwest or Great Plains.

In a brief foreword to the collection, Garland explains that he wanted these stories to express the daily hardships, back-breaking toil, and depressing drudgery of farm life. That might have made for a great book if he had stuck with this idea. While a negative view of rural life does appear throughout the book, its impact is watered-down by country-bumpkin humor, Ma and Pa Kettle-style accented dialogue, and unrealistic happy endings. Even so, many critics of Garland’s day found the realism off-putting and vulgar. Garland’s naturalistic writing style was groundbreaking for 1890s America, too avant garde for some critics of the time, but Main-Travelled Roads feels tame compared to the darker fiction of the muckraking era of a decade or two later, when writers such as Jack London, Upton Sinclair, and Frank Norris brought American literary naturalism to its apex. Garland could also be considered the godfather of the regionalist movement in American fiction that would culminate in the work of Willa Cather and William Faulkner.

All of these stories are good, but few are great. They all generally start off as a blunt and gritty portrait of a poor farmer’s plight, but in the second half they veer off into rosier feel-good territory. The best entries in the collection stop short of melodramatic endings and conclude with a more realistic contentment. Among these are “The Return of a Private,” about soldiers returning home from the Civil War to their Wisconsin farms, and “A Day’s Pleasure,” about a farmer’s wife’s rare day in town. In the likely autobiographical tale “God’s Ravens,” a farm-born writer decides to leave Chicago and head back to his hometown to live a healthier stress-free life. He and his wife soon discover, however, that you can’t go home again, as they have trouble fitting in with their rustic neighbors. “Under the Lion’s Paw” takes a proto-muckraking stab at socioeconomic issues facing poor farmers. “A ‘Good Fellow’s’ Wife” concerns a small-town bank failure, but it’s told in a more humorous style.

Main-Travelled Roads is a better-than-average collection of short fiction from the end of the 19th century, but it suffers from too much hillbilly comedy. If you’re looking for a work of fiction that really does portray the harsh reality of American farm life with brutally naturalistic realism, I would recommend the 1921 novel Dust by Marcet and Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, set in Kansas.

Stories in this collection

A Branch Road

Up the Coolly

Among the Corn-Rows

The Return of a Private

Under the Lion’s Paw

The Creamery Man

A Day’s Pleasure

Mrs. Ripley’s Trip

Uncle Ethan Ripley

God’s Ravens

A “Good Fellow’s” Wife