In the 1870s and 1880s Philander Deming published a series of short stories about the Adirondack region of upstate New York. His best work places him among the major local-color writers: what rural Massachusetts was for Mary Wilkins Freeman or Down-East Maine was for Sarah Orne Jewett the Adirondacks were for Deming. Working with the lives of ordinary people he knew well, Deming portrayed local life while aiming at universal truths. Yet, perhaps because he published only sixteen stories and several brief autobiographical sketches and because his later stories failed to live up to his early promise, Deming is almost wholly forgotten today. This neglect is unfortunate, for his best stories are evidence of the vigor of early realistic fiction. William Dean Howells thought highly of Deming's work and accepted several of his stories for the Atlantic Monthly. Of the tales in Deming's first collection, Adirondack Stories (1880), Howells...