6 - Main-Travelled Roads Revisited

Summary

One of the almost obligatory occasions of academic literary criticism is the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the publication of a major work. In seeking to take advantage of this custom in order to make some remarks about Hamlin Garland's Main-Travelled Roads, which first appeared in the spring of 1891, I wish also to discuss at some length a much later and lesser work, my own critical study Hamlin Garland's Early Work and Career, published in 1960. My plan, in brief, is to undertake a re-examination of Garland's collection of six Mississippi Valley stories by means of a comparison of my older ideas about the work and my present sense of its nature. My hope is that this comparison will suggest both the permanent vitality of Main-Travelled Roads and something about the various changes that have occurred in literary criticism and scholarship in the thirty-five years or so since I first examined the book.

I say “thirty-five years or so” despite the appearance of my study in 1960 because Hamlin Garland's Early Work and Career was in fact a revised version of the doctoral dissertation which I prepared during the early 1950s while I was a graduate student at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and which I completed in 1955. I can't say that I began my doctoral studies in 1951 with the expectation that I would write a dissertation on Hamlin Garland.