In 1887, Hamlin Garland traveled from Boston to South Dakota to visit his mother and father, whom he had not seen in six years. According to his own account, the trip through farming country was a revelation. Although he had been brought up on a farm, he had never realized how wretched farmers’ lives were. The farther west he traveled, the more oppressive it became for him to see the bleakness of the landscape and the poverty of its people. When he reached his parents’ farm and found his mother living in hopeless misery, Garland’s depression turned to bitterness, and in this mood he wrote Main-Travelled Roads, a series of short stories about farm life in the Midwest.
