SOURCE: "The Search for Reality," in The Critical Period in American Literature, The University of North Carolina Press, 1951, pp. 43-67.

In this excerpt, Knight details the events that inspired Garland's fiction and analyzes the stories in Main-Travelled Roads, Prairie Folks, and Wayside Courtships.

[William Dean] Howells had no more admiring and articulate defender than Hamlin Garland, who had somehow picked up the title of Professor. Lecturing on Howells at Avon-by-the-Sea, Garland quoted his friend's definition of realism as "the truthful treatment of material" and rightly appraised it as a revolutionary step in the history of the American novel; he went on to assert that [Howells's novel] "A Modern Instance is the greatest, most rigidly artistic novel ever written by an American, and ranks with the great novels of the world." The two men had in 1891 a kind of master-and-disciple relationship, with the older one encouraging the other to...