Raised on farms throughout the midwest, Hamlin Garland moved to Boston as a young man and became a writer. A visit with his family in the Dakota Territory resulted in a "depressing but eye-opening return to the places of his boyhood, [providing] the stimulus and material for his first fiction. With the perspective distance had given him, he sensed the 'tragic futility' of the farmers' existence and resolved, as he wrote in retrospect, to put the 'stern facts' of the rural American West into literature. The result was the realistic, local-color stories that made up Main-Travelled Roads Garland narrates episodes in the grueling life of middle-border farming . [he] describes realistically the 'sorrow, resignation, and a sort of dumb despair' of the farmers and members of their families.