This was a truly beautiful piece of work from someone that intimately knew and loved the prairie. His words paint vivid beautiful pictures of not only golden flecks of sunlight bouncing through the leaves but also of the pain and suffering that goes from being tied to your land. Hamlin won the Pulitzer for Daughter of a Middle Road which I have just started reading, but Main Travelled Roads was definitely better in my opinion than Son of a Middle Border. He absolutely captured the moments that I see when walking through the fields early that take my breath away, the feeling of infiniteness of the prairie sky, the song that the lands sings as wind whistles through the corn and the grasshoppers string.Its not just the beautiful imagery though, he also captured the people well, and not in a demeaning way. He wanted to show that people on the prairie could be genius, loyal to a fault, kind and giving, and utter scoundrels. He showed them as people rather than as idealistic farmers that were in the propaganda at the time,. (I would like to mention here that as a woman married to farmer I found truck commercials almost deeply insulting in their desperate ass-sucking attempts to glorify modern day midwesterners, the commercial writers could learn a thing or two from Hamlin). He demonstrated the almost death defying work of the farmers, the tenacity and perserverance of their women, and the deep pains of farming and homesteading. He showed the needs of young women, love that knows no times, desperation, fear, and courage. He captured it all in this wonderful collection of short stories.You wont walk away from this novel without learning something.
Garland, Hamlin. MAIN-TRAVELLED ROADS. (1891). ****. Garland was born in a log cabin in Wisconsin in 1860. 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 home to visit his family in 1887 and 1889. 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. The key reason that this collection has survived is that Garland represented the transition of American literature from a sort of Impressionism to that of Realism, although he wasn’t fully there yet. Many of the stories are so ‘romantic’ in nature as to make you want to skim through them quickly. A few, however, will probably remain in the canon of American literature – in spite of Garland’s constant pessimism on the fate of the Midwest farmer. Garland went on to write several other works, including “A Daughter of the Middle Border,” (1921), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. He later moved to L.A., and lived until 1940. Recommended.
Do You like book Main-Travelled Roads (1995)?
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.Ultimately disappointing. Some of the plots or characters were good and/or touching. . .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 turn off. Altogether, it was an okay read, but nothing special.
—Marissa
First published in 1891, 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 generation of homesteaders who settled on the land following the Civil War.More at my blog.
—Ron
Glad to have finally read this. There are a couple impressive stories in here: Up the Coolly and A Branch Road in particular (Under the Lion's Paw and The Creamery Man are pretty good too). 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 reveal interesting aspects of rural life on the eve of the twentieth century, but they feel rather ordinary in comparison. Garland's picture of life in the rural midwest - especially the 'coolly'/coulee region - is a dark one, but even so he never ceases to point out the beauty of nature and the kindness of the people.
—Alex
