Main-Travelled Roads

This classic short story collection offers an unblinking portrait of the American Midwest during a time of intense change.

Originally published in 1891, Main-Travelled Roads includes eleven short stories set in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota, or the region of America Hamlin Garland called the “Middle Border.” Depicting an agrarian life of exploitation, misogyny, and poverty, Garland’s radical, realist stories—written in a mode he called “veritism”—refute romantic conceptions of the rural Midwest.

Unrelenting, yet infused with a hopeful vision of how things ought to be, this collection is gripping, hard-hitting, and surprisingly beautiful. Main-Travelled Roads was Garland’s first major success, a little-known classic of American literature and the Midwest.