Poor White

Hugh McVey moves from Missouri to the agrarian town of Bidwell, Ohio. He invents a mechanical cabbage planter to ease the burden of famers, but an investor in town exploits his product, which fails to succeed. His next invention, a corn cutter, makes him a millionaire and transforms Bidwell into a center of manufacturing. McVey, perennially lonely and ruminative, meets Clara Butterworth, who attends college at nearby Ohio State and is perennially harassed by her potential matches. Published one year after Winesburg, Ohio, in 1920, Poor White has a modernist style, an realist attention to every day life, and an eerily contemporary resonance.

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.”