SOURCE: "Struggle and Fight," in The Great Tradition: An Interpretation of American Literature Since the Civil War, revised edition, Macmillan Publishing Company, 1935, pp. 142-48.

Hicks was an American literary critic whose famous study The Great Tradition: An Interpretation of American Literature Since the Civil War (1933) established him as the foremost advocate of Marxist critical thought in Depression-era America. In the following excerpt from that book, he offers a brief assessment of Garland's career and maintains that the power of the author's best work, his short stories, stems from his identification with Midwestern farmers and the agrarian reform movement of the 1880s and 1890s.

[From the 1860s to the 1880s, Middle Western farmers] had not shared in the prosperity of the post-war years, and yet the West felt the depression of 1873 quite as sharply as the East. In the Patrons of Husbandry and the Greenback Party they recorded their...