Edward Everett Hale is remembered by millions as the author of The Man Without a Country. This popular and gifted nineteenth-century writer was an outstanding and prolific contributor to the fields of journalism, fiction, essay, and history. He wrote more than 150 books and pamphlets (one novel sold more than a million copies in his lifetime) and was intimately associated with the publication of many of the early American journals, among them the North American Review, Atlantic Monthly, and Christian Examiner. He served as editor of Old...

Hamlin Garland's Main-Travelled Roads is recognized as one of the early landmarks of American literary realism. But Garland's shift in mid-career from the harsh verisimilitude of Prairie Folks and Prairie Songs to a romanticizing of the Far West, and from ardent espousal of the principles of "veritism" to violent denunciations of naturalism, is a paradox which has long puzzled literary historians.

In tracing the evolution of Garland's work, the various reactions of his stories under the influence of editorial comment and of contemporary critical reaction, Jean Holloway...