Main-Travelled Roads

Hamlin Garland grew up on the hardscrabble farms of the upper Midwest, and these eleven stories refuse to romanticize what he saw there. Set across the prairie states of what he called the Middle Border, they follow soldiers coming home to mortgaged land, wives worn down by endless labor, and tenants trapped by debt they can never repay. The most famous, Under the Lion’s Paw, shows a struggling farmer cheated by the very man who claims to help him. Garland wrote with a plain, unsparing honesty that helped push American fiction toward realism in the 1890s, and the collection made his reputation. Free PDF and EPUB editions are available to download.