Prairie Folks

In these deceptively simple stories, Hamlin Garland captures something most histories of the American frontier miss: the daily texture of lives spent wrestling a living from stubborn soil. The opening tale introduces Uncle Ethan Ripley, a farmer who prides himself on reading a man's character by how he perches in a wagon seat, an absurd, lovable vanity that sets the tone for everything that follows. When a wandering patent medicine salesman arrives, Ethan's hospitable impulse leads him to allow a garish advertisement painted on his brand-new barn, sparking inevitable conflict with his long-suffering wife. This is Garland's genius: he finds comedy and meaning in the small dramas of prairie existence, the tensions between neighbors, the loneliness of isolation, the quiet heroism of people who simply endure. Written with sharp observation and genuine affection for people the wider world would call ordinary, these stories preserve a world that existed for only a brief moment in American history.