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A review by prairiephlox
Main-Travelled Roads by Hamlin Garland
4.0
This was a truly beautiful piece of work from someone that intimately knew and loved the prairie. His words paint vivid beautiful pictures of not only golden flecks of sunlight bouncing through the leaves but also of the pain and suffering that goes from being tied to your land. Hamlin won the Pulitzer for Daughter of a Middle Road which I have just started reading, but Main Travelled Roads was definitely better in my opinion than Son of a Middle Border. He absolutely captured the moments that I see when walking through the fields early that take my breath away, the feeling of infiniteness of the prairie sky, the song that the lands sings as wind whistles through the corn and the grasshoppers string.
Its not just the beautiful imagery though, he also captured the people well, and not in a demeaning way. He wanted to show that people on the prairie could be genius, loyal to a fault, kind and giving, and utter scoundrels. He showed them as people rather than as idealistic farmers that were in the propaganda at the time,. (I would like to mention here that as a woman married to farmer I found truck commercials almost deeply insulting in their desperate ass-sucking attempts to glorify modern day midwesterners, the commercial writers could learn a thing or two from Hamlin). He demonstrated the almost death defying work of the farmers, the tenacity and perserverance of their women, and the deep pains of farming and homesteading. He showed the needs of young women, love that knows no times, desperation, fear, and courage. He captured it all in this wonderful collection of short stories.
You wont walk away from this novel without learning something.
Its not just the beautiful imagery though, he also captured the people well, and not in a demeaning way. He wanted to show that people on the prairie could be genius, loyal to a fault, kind and giving, and utter scoundrels. He showed them as people rather than as idealistic farmers that were in the propaganda at the time,. (I would like to mention here that as a woman married to farmer I found truck commercials almost deeply insulting in their desperate ass-sucking attempts to glorify modern day midwesterners, the commercial writers could learn a thing or two from Hamlin). He demonstrated the almost death defying work of the farmers, the tenacity and perserverance of their women, and the deep pains of farming and homesteading. He showed the needs of young women, love that knows no times, desperation, fear, and courage. He captured it all in this wonderful collection of short stories.
You wont walk away from this novel without learning something.