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Hamlin Garland (1860-1922) in 1891 achieved with his “Main-Traveled Roads” as quickly earned a reputation as Cable and Harris had done with their first volumes. The son of a sturdy Western pioneer, he had passed a boyhood of incessant toil before breaking away to earn his own schooling, which culminated with several years of self-directed study in Boston. A vacation return in 1887 to Wisconsin, Dakota, and Iowa revealed to him the story-stuff of his early life, and during the next two years he wrote the realistic studies which won him his first recognition. In them, he explained later, he tried to embody the stern truth. “Though conditions have changed somewhat since that time, yet for the hired man and the renter farm life in the West is still a stern round of drudgery. My pages present it—not as the summer boarder or the young lady novelist sees it—but as the working farmer endures it.”
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| Hamlin Garland |
To the reader of Mr. Garland’s work as a whole it is evident that the richest part of his life was over with the writing of this book and “A Spoil of Office” (1892) and “Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly” (1895). With the adoption of city life his interests became diffuse and miscellaneous, as his writing did also. The almost startling strength of “A Son of the Middle Border” (1918) reënforces this conviction, for this late piece of autobiography is the story of the author’s first thirty-three years and owes its fine power to the fact that in composing it Mr. Garland renewed his youth like the eagle’s. What he propounded in his booklet of essays, “Crumbling Idols” (1894), he illustrated in his stories up to that time. In them he made his best contribution to American literature, except for this recent reminiscent volume. In almost every quarter of the country similar expositions of American life were multiplied and to such an extent that Mrs. Deland, Mrs. Wharton, and Mr. Garland are chosen simply as illustrations of an output which would require volumes for full treatment.