SOURCE: "The Realism of the Mississippi Valley," in The Prairie and the Making of Middle America: Four Centuries of Description, The Torch Press, 1926, pp. 328-44.

In the excerpt below, Dondore discusses the grim portrayals of rural life in Garland's short stories, recognizing them as truthful depictions drawn from the author's own experiences.

[Hamlin Garland] wrote some of the most widely discussed of western short stories; he created the most complete and artistic portrayal of the epic lure that in three centuries drew the line of migration from the Atlantic to the Pacific; he flung down the gauntlet to Eastern critics in his [1894] volume of essays Crumbling Idols; in his work appears not only the fullest presentation but the most satisfying explanation of the ironic paradox that has caused the Middle West, a region celebrated since its discovery in the most hyperbolic terms—"a region of enchantment," "a terrestrial...