Main-Travelled Roads.

GARLAND, Hamlin.

$750.00

Item Number: 139642

Boston: Arena Publishing Company, 1891.

First edition of the author’s second book. Octavo, original cloth, patterned endpapers. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the front free patterned endpaper, “To my friend Hird whose encouragement was so timely. With fraternal best wishes. Hamlin Garland Boston June 9/91.” In very good condition. Bookplate. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box.

Garland lived on various Midwestern farms throughout his young life, but settled in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1884 to pursue a career in writing. A collection of short stories inspired by his childhood, Main-Travelled Roads was Hamlin Garland's first major success. "With the perspective distance had given him, he sensed the ‘tragic futility’ of the farmers’ existence and resolved, as he wrote in retrospect, to put the ‘stern facts’ of the rural American West into literature. The result was the realistic, local-color stories that made up Main-Travelled Roads… Garland narrates episodes in the grueling life of middle-border farming…. [he] describes realistically the ‘sorrow, resignation, and a sort of dumb despair’ of the farmers and members of their families” (ANB).