Main-Travelled Roads

These stories show the hard lives of farmers in the American Midwest, on the prairies of Wisconsin, Iowa and Dakota, at the end of the nineteenth century: endless work, mortgages, failing harvests, land speculators who raise the rent on improvements a tenant has made himself, and wives worn out before their time. In 'The Return of a Private' a soldier comes home from the Civil War; in 'Up the Coulé' a successful actor visits the brother he left behind on the farm.

Hamlin Garland (1860–1940), who grew up on Midwestern farms himself, published the book in 1891, and its honest realism helped end the sentimental picture of country life. Compare Willa Cather's O Pioneers!.