In the book's eleven stories, Garland portrays the hardships of agrarian life, deconstructing the conventional myth of the American prairie while highlighting the economic and social conditions that characterized agricultural communities in the rural Midwest.

[2] As foreshadowed by the dedication, Garland's stories paint an unforgiving portrait of Midwestern farm life: unrelenting physical toil, harsh living conditions, widespread poverty and an overwhelming sense of hopelessness.

In his introduction to Main-Travelled Roads, scholar Joseph B. McCullough recognizes Garland as one of the 19th century's most influential voices concerning the challenges of post Civil War agrarian society, especially the inequities of the tax system and the struggle for women's rights.

In the Boston Herald, reviewer Louise Chandler Moulton wrote, "I have never before felt the desperate unspeakable pathos of the prairie farmer's struggle with life," before offering that the collection "was far too minutely and baldly real to please my own taste".

The color, the light, the life, the movement, the readiness to turn from melancholy feeling to humorous perception, - all of these are gone, together with the ameliorating negro; and in their places, produced by a massive, crude force will have to be reckoned with in our literature, is one overwhelming impression of grinding, unremunerated toil".