Main-travelled roads: six Mississippi valley stories

Hamlin Garland was a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, poet, essayist, and short story writer. "Main-Travelled Roads" was Garland's first major literary success. It is a collection of short stories inspired by his childhood on his family's farm in Wisconsin. It was also influenced by the ideas of Henry George, a political economist who promoted the "single tax" on land in the United States, and whose work inspired an economic philosophy based on the belief that people should own the value they produce themselves but that the value of land should belong equally to all. His second autobiography, "A Daughter of the Middle Border", won the Pulitzer Prize in 1922. Garland moved to Hollywood in 1929 and taught for a time at USC (which now houses his literary papers).