SOURCE: A review of Main-Travelled Roads, in The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. LXIX, No. CCCCXII, February, 1892, p. 266.

In the following excerpt, the anonymous critic comments on Garland's "earnest" depiction of rural toil in Main-Travelled Roads and cautions that the unremitting despair of the stories borders on dullness.

Whoever fares with Mr. Garland along his Main-Travelled Roads is still no farther from the South than the Mississippi Valley, but the environment is unmistakably the West. The color, the light, the life, the movement, the readiness to turn from melancholy feeling to humorous perception,—all these are gone, together with the ameliorating negro; and in their places, produced by a massive, crude force which will have to be reckoned with in our literature, is one overwhelming impression of grinding, unremunerated toil. Mr. Garland's West is not the beckoning Occident—familiar to our imaginations, if not to our hopes—of enterprise and...