SOURCE: "Hamlin Garland: Realist of Old Age," in Mid-America, Vol. IX, 1982, pp. 23-37.

In the following excerpt, Krauth examines Garland's depiction of the elderly in Main-Travelled Roads and Prairie Folks, maintaining that the author gave "serious, extended, and successful treatment to a subject that is more often skirted in American literature—old age. "

When he is remembered at all, Hamlin Garland is recalled in literary history as a writer who took the right trail in the beginning, as the realist of Main-Travelled Roads, only to wander astray into the thin atmosphere of rocky mountain romance in the end. Garland has been praised for opening the Midwest to fiction more authentically than his regional predecessors, writers like Edward Eggleston, E. W. Howe, and Joseph Kirkland; for fulfilling Howells' dictum that the commonplace is the proper subject for the realist; and for instilling into the main-stream of American writing a...