Main-Travelled Roads

Garland, Hamlin. Main-Travelled Roads. New York: Holt 1891. Print

First Sentences:

In the windless September dawn a voice went ringing clear and sweet, a man's voice, singing a cheap and common air. 

Yet something in the sound of it told he was young, jubilant, and a happy lover.

Description:


Sometimes it is wonderful to simply immerse yourself in the era and environment of a book. One where you are able to really get to know the people, to experience first-hand their daily lives, to see their dreams, enjoy their loves, and feel their frustrations. Such a book is Hamlin Garland's Main-Travelled Roads, a heart-rending series of short stories about rural farm families In Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the prairies of the Midwest in the late 1860s.

Having spent years in big cities on the east coast, author Garland in 1887 returned to his boyhood farm in Iowa where is mother still lived.

I found my mother imprisoned in a small cabin on the enormous sunburnt, treeless plain, with no expectation of ever living anywhere else. Deserted by her sons and failing in health, she endured the discomforts of her life uncomplainingly.  

This realistic image inspired Garland to write these eleven exquisitely-crafted stories of people living out lives on these treeless plains. going through each day with no hope of changing their profession or their economic status, nor of exploring the world through travel or new relationships. These people face daily challenges and routines that rarely change and most often bring sadness or frustration. But these people go on in order to survive, enduring their harsh surroundings to deal with another lonely day, and then another, and another.

The houses, bare as boxes, dropped on the treeless plains, the barbed-wire fences running at right angles, and the towns mere assemblages of flimsy wooden sheds with painted-pine battlement, produced on me the effect of an almost helpless and sterile poverty.

The stories include intimate portraits of a hard-working farmer who is ruined by his dishonest landowner; an elderly wife who decides to leave her husband and take a trip to visit her family for the first time in decades; and (autobiographically?) a successful son who returns to his childhood home and his proud but poverty-stricken mother and brother.

The stories are grim, dusty, and worn, giving readers a look at a world rarely portrayed in literature. But these fascinating people and their stories grip readers in their grittiness and realism. The reader is completely engulfed in a foreign land inhabited by strong individuals who speak little but with tremendous depth.

And Harland's writing also provides pictures of great beauty, however fleeting they may be. 

Chicago has three winds that blow upon it. One comes from the east, and the mind goes out to the cold gray blue lake. One from the north, and men think of illimitable spaces of pine-lands and maple-clad ridges which lead to the unknown deeps of the arctic woods.

But the third is the west or southwest wind, dry, magnetic, full of smell of unmeasured miles of growing grain in summer, or ripening corn and wheat in autumn. When it comes in winter the air glitters with incredible brilliancy. 

I found myself deep, deep into this world of 150 years ago. The writing, the characters, the environment, and the realism of these daily lives completely captivated me. It's not a pretty picture Garland paints, but an honest one that deserves seeing through his words. It was simply great.

Happy reading. 

Fred

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