Main-Travelled Roads was published by Arena Publishing in Boston in 1891, and it was one of the most important story collections in American literary history — the book that brought the realities of Midwestern farm life to a national audience and challenged the pastoral mythology that dominated American thinking about the rural heartland.
The six stories of the first edition (later expanded to eleven) are set in the farming country of Wisconsin, Iowa, and the Dakotas — the “Middle Border” of Garland’s childhood. They depict a world of relentless labor, economic insecurity, and emotional deprivation. In “Under the Lion’s Paw,” a farmer works himself to exhaustion improving a rented farm, only to have the landlord raise the price when the improvements increase the land’s value. In “Up the Coolly,” a successful actor returns to the farm where his brother has spent decades in backbreaking labor, and the contrast between their lives is unbearable. In “The Return of a Private,” a Civil War veteran comes home to a farm that has deteriorated in his absence, and the homecoming is not triumphant but bleak.
Garland’s title is itself a statement: the “main-travelled roads” of the Middle Border are “long and wearyful,” full of ruts and dust in summer and snow in winter, traveled by people who are going nowhere in particular because there is nowhere to go. The dedication — “To my father and mother, whose half-century of pilgrimage on the main-travelled road of life has brought them only toil and deprivation” — announces the book’s purpose: to tell the truth about rural America, however painful.
William Dean Howells championed the collection, and it established Garland as a leader of the “veritism” movement — his term for fiction that told the truth about common life without sentimentality or evasion.
Collecting Main-Travelled Roads
First edition (Arena Publishing, Boston, 1891): Cloth binding. The first edition contains only six stories; later editions added more.
Market values:
- First edition (1891, six stories): $200–$600
- Expanded editions: $20–$60
- Modern reprints: $8–$15