SOURCE: Foote, Stephanie. “The Value of Regional Identity: Labor, Representation, and Authorship in Hamlin Garland.” Studies in American Fiction 27, no. 2 (autumn 1999): 159-82.

In the following essay, Foote evaluates the significance of Hamlin Garland as a regional writer, contending that Garland goes against the grain of “conventional” regional literature in that he refuses to “aestheticize” the Midwest in his fiction.

Hamlin Garland has always posed something of a problem for literary critics; even those who find his work historically important seem to hold it in contempt. Prolific, passionate, sometimes absurdly polemical, Garland's writing has always occupied an uneasy place in the canon of American literature. Best known now for his early collection of regional stories Main-Travelled Roads (1891) as well as for the reformist sympathies those stories seemed to embody, Garland's later literary output consisted almost entirely of popular romances, heart-warming narratives of his frontier childhood, and popular western potboilers...