Turn-of-the-century American literature apparently is being rediscovered, after lurking for many decades in the shadows thanks largely to a fashionable obsession with the Hemingway-Fitzgerald generation. Dreiser, Hart Crane, the early Willa Cather, Frank Norris, Sarah Orne Jewett have all profited from this, and now comes Garland, a self-educated farmer's son from Wisconsin, whose works used sometimes to be found in old public libraries in this country. Garland, like others of his generation, had a radical social conscience but while his contemporaries wrote mostly about the exploited urban poor, he concentrated on the American farmer and his fight for survival. The style of these eleven stories is raw, sometimes almost uncouth, but the energy and social passion are undeniable, and Garland knew at first hand the milieu he describes.