Critical Essay | Critical Essay by William Dean Howells

Critical Essay by William Dean Howells

SOURCE: "Editor's Study," in Critical Essays on Hamlin Garland, edited by James Nagel, G. K. Hall & Co., 1982, pp. 35-6.

A prominent figure in nineteenth-century American literature, Howells was one of the leading advocates and practitioners of literary realism in the United States. He offered early encouragement for Garland's writing, and in the following excerpt, he declares Main-Travelled Roads to be an accurate depiction of the Midwestern farmer's plight as well as "a work of art."

.. . At present we have only too much to talk about in a book so robust and terribly serious as Mr. Hamlin Garland's volume called Main-Travelled Roads. That is what they call the highways in the part of the West that Mr. Garland comes from and writes about; and these stories are full of the bitter and burning dust, the foul and trampled slush of the common avenues of life: the life...
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