Hamlin Garland

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.

This edition of Hamlin Garland's best novel—best both for historical reasons and intrinsically—-reprints Rose of Dutcher's Coolly in its original form. Partly in response to the attack on it when it appeared in 1895, Garland revised the novel in 1899, and this revision was used as the text of all later republications of Rose. As well as comparing the 1895 and 1899 editions, Donald Pizer's introduction places the novel in the context of Garland's career and in particular defines his attitude toward woman's sexuality as revealed in Rose—an attitude that was then considered radical and that lead to the attempted suppression of the book.

Boy Life on the Prairie was first published in 1899, some eighteen years before the appearance of Hamlin Garland's A Son of the Middle Border. The broad scope of the latter book, as B. R. McElderry, Jr., tells us in the introduction to this new edition of Boy Life, has overshadowed the "earlier and better book of reminiscence dealing specifically with Garland's boyhood experiences on an Iowa farm from 1869 to about 1881. When he wrote Boy Life on the Prairie Garland was much closer to the subject than he was in 1917, and he had the advantage of a more restricted aim: to tell directly and specifically what it was like to grow up in northeast Iowa in the years just after the Civil War. It may safely be said that no one else has given so clear and informative an account. When one considers other accounts of boyhood in nineteenth-century America—those of Aldrich, Clemens, Warner, and Howells, for example—one is impressed with the thoroughness and precision of Garland's book. Aside from Main-Travelled Roads, Boy Life, is probably the best single book that Garland ever wrote."The Bison Book edition is the first in more than fifty years to reproduce in full the 1899 text. It also includes an introduction addressed "To My Young Readers" and the "Author's Notes" which appeared in the 1926 edition published by Allyn & Bacon. The forty-seven line drawings and six full-page illustrations by E. W. Deming are reproduced from the 1899 edition. In his introduction, Dr. McElderry provides a thorough and interesting analysis of Boy Life and compares it with the sketches written in 1888 which were Garland's first attempt at reminiscence, as well as with A Son of the Middle Border.