Published one year after Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson's
greatest novel offers a bleak portrait of luck and modernization in
middle America. Part of Belt's Revivals Series and with a new
introduction by John Lingan, author of Homeplace.
After a childhood living in poverty, Hugh McVey moves from Missouri to
the agrarian town of Bidwell, Ohio, hoping to become an inventor. There,
he develops a mechanical cabbage planter to ease the burden of famers,
but an investor in town exploits his product and it eventually fails.
His next invention, a corn cutter, makes him a millionaire and
transforms Bidwell into a center of manufacturing. McVey, perennially
lonely and ruminative, eventually meets Clara Butterworth, who attends
college at nearby Ohio State and is perennially harassed by her
potential suitors. But McVey is plagued by the search for love in a new
America overrun by lifeless machines. Published in 1920, Poor White
has a modernist sensibility and a realist attention to everyday life but
also an eerily contemporary resonance.
A perfect distillation of how industrialization changed small-town
America, Poor White is a little-known classic of American literature
from the author H. L. Mencken dubbed "America's Most Distinctive
Novelist."