Prairie Folks was published by Stone and Kimball in Chicago in 1893, and it extends the territory that Main-Travelled Roads had opened — the lives of ordinary people on the Middle Border, depicted without sentimentality or condescension.
The stories in Prairie Folks are less uniformly bleak than those in the earlier collection — Garland allows more humor and more warmth into these portraits — but they share the same commitment to truthful representation. The characters are farmers, hired men, country schoolteachers, traveling salesmen, and the wives and daughters who hold the households together. Their lives are shaped by the economics of agriculture (low prices, high costs, unpredictable weather), the social isolation of prairie life, and the tensions between ambition and resignation that define the rural experience.
Garland’s strength as a short story writer is his ear for speech and his eye for gesture — he captures the way people actually talk and move on the prairie with a fidelity that gives his fiction documentary value. The stories are also valuable as social history: they record a way of life that was already changing when Garland wrote about it and has since disappeared entirely.
Collecting Prairie Folks
First edition (Stone and Kimball, Chicago, 1893): Cloth binding.
Market values:
- First edition: $60–$180
- Later editions: $10–$25