Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature

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[254] of larger development than any mere interpretation of the local type. The wondrous “transitory city” created by the Chicago Exposition made an era in Western life, and in the standing of that region before the world. For the first time, we all asked ourselves, not “Is this the wild West?” but “Is not this America?” and from that moment, it would seem, the West began to find direct expression in literature. Howells can never represent it; he came East too soon and too reverentially. But we find it in a book like Main-Travelled Roads by Hamlin Garland, where the vigor of characterization carries one away from the first moment to the last, and the figures seem absolutely real. Mr. Garland's pictures of life in the middle West are sombre, but not morbid. In one respect his work and that of Frank Norris present an odd paradox. Each of these writers set out with the stated intention of breaking away from the literary traditions of the East. They did, so far as the Eastern states of North America are concerned; but they did not hesitate to go still farther east, to France and Russia, for their-models. Mr. Garland's earlier tales have much of the ironical compactness