Hamlin Garland

Garland's constellation of stories sort of fits between Washington Irving and The Country of Pointed Firs. The tales are related and mutually informative, but not temporally ordered or causally linked in any tight way. Like a few early hypertexts (Victory Garden and Patchwork Girl, for instance), he uses a visual metaphor in attempt to link events without tight chronological relationship.

The text shares a sentimentality with Jewett and Irving. Unline a lot of Irving, the style remains level. Unlike Firs, the characters don't necessarily know each other, though they could.

Garland handles dialect sort of like Twain or Howells: he misspells words to render pronunciation, presumably according to some eastern seaboard accent that he would have considered standard. The characters' syntax appears fairly mainstream, though, even when their pronunciation does not, and I wonder whether he didn't clean it up a bit or whether the dialect wasn't just more standard than my grandmother's rural Pennsylvanian or my grandfather's Texas-Arizona guttersnipe patois.

A lot of the value here would seem to come with the sense of place and social class. He doesn't mask the poverty or approve of it backhandedly, though he romances the people a bit; the portrayal is sincere and goodhearted as are Steinbeck's depression scenes, even similar in a lot of ways.