Hamlin Garland published some forty-odd books in a career spanning over fifty years. Of these, Main-Travelled Roads, Crumbling Idols, and A Son of the Middle Border are still read with considerable interest. The first is a collection of short stories, the second a work of literary criticism, and the third an autobiography. The absence of a novel from this group, despite Garland's extensive publication in this form, suggests that he was not entirely at home in the novel form and that his longer fiction is of little permanent value. This observation holds true with the major exception of Rose of Dutcher's Coolly, first published in 1895.

Born in a narrow valley near West Salem, Wisconsin, in 1860, Garland spent his youth as a farm boy in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa. He was ambitious to become a writer and orator, but it was not until 1884 that he made his way to Boston in order to begin his career. After several years of hardship and misdirection, he found that he wanted to write about midwestern farm and town life. His attitude was consciously anti-bucolic and anti-mythic. The West to Garland was neither an idyllic retreat from the cares of the city nor a place to seek one's fortune. His earliest and best stories, collected in Main-Travelled Roads and Prairie Folks, portray the bleakness and emptiness of farm life.