Main-Travelled Roads contains eleven stories in this expanded and revised 1922 edition of an undisputed American classic. "Under the Lion's Paw" shows an honest, hard-working farmer victimized by a greedy landlord. Equally powerful is the semi-autobiographical "Up the Coolly," concerning a successful son who returns from the East to find his mother and brother trapped on a poor farm, defeated in spite of their best efforts. "Mrs. Ripley's Trip" is a tender story of an elderly couple settled in their frugal country ways, with the wife determined to realize her dream of revisiting childhood scenes.

 

Although Garland paints no pretty pictures, he offers exhilarating moments in the lives of these farm people and never ignores the strength of individual will.

 

William Dean Howells's introduction to the 1922 edition has been retained.

Introducing this Bison Books edition is Joseph B. McCullough, the author of Hamlin Garland and coeditor of Selected Letters of Hamlin Garland, also published by the University of Nebraska Press. He is a professor of English at the University of Nevada.

"Was it not in Garland that American farmers first talked like farmers? Was it not Garland who among the very first dedicated his career to realism? Was it not Garland who, almost alone in the eighties, sat in the Boston Public Library writing out of his loneliness and poverty those first realistic stories that were to guide others to a new literature in America? It is true."—Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature