SOURCE: An introduction to Main-Travelled Roads by Hamlin Garland, edited by Thomas A. Bledsoe, Rinehart & Co., 1954, pp. ix-xl.

Bledsoe is an American author, editor, and educator. In this excerpt, he comments on Garland's genesis as a fiction writer and his ultimate deterioration, but the critic upholds the artistic achievement of Main-Travelled Roads, maintaining that Garland "produced a handful of minor masterpieces" in his career.

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It would be easy to see in Hamlin Garland one of the minor tragedies of American literature. In the contrast between the bitter realism of Main-Travelled Roads and the complacent romanticizing of They of the High Trails, its later counterpart, there is a sense of a good man gone wrong that has the overtones of an American tragedy. Garland's rebellion was so intense and his conformity so ingenuous that one cannot help speculating on what might have happened had he not lost, as Howells...