Poor White is an American novel by Sherwood Anderson, published in 1920.

It is the story of an inventor, Hugh McVey, who rises from poverty on the bank of the Mississippi River. The novel shows the influence of industrialism on the rural heartland of America.

Sherwood Anderson (September 13, 1876 – March 8, 1941) was an American writer, mainly of short stories, most notably the collection Winesburg, Ohio. That work's influence on American fiction was profound, and its literary voice can be heard in Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, John Steinbeck, Erskine Caldwell and others.

Works:

    * Windy McPherson's Son, (1916, novel)
    * Marching Men, (1917, novel)
    * Winesburg, Ohio, (1919, novel)
    * Poor White, (1920, novel)
    * Triumph of the Egg, (1921, short stories)
    * Many Marriages, (1923, novel)
    * Horses and Men, (1923, short stories)
    * A Story-Teller's Story, (1924, semi-autobiographical novel)
    * Sherwood Anderson's Memoirs, (1924, memoirs)
    * An Exibition of Paintings By Alfred H. Maurer, (1924, non-fiction)
    * Dark Laughter, (1925, novel)
    * A Meeting South, (1925, novel)
    * Modern Writer, (1925, non-fiction)
    * Tar: A Midwest Childhood, (1926, semi-autobiographical novel)
    * Sherwood Anderson's Notebook, (1926, memoirs)
    * Hello Towns, (1929, short stories)
    * Alice: The Lost Novel, (1929, novel)
    * Onto Being Published, (1930, non-fiction)
    * Beyond Desire, (1932, novel)
    * Death in the Woods, (1933, essays)
    * Puzzled America, (1935, essays)
    * Kit Brandon, (1936, novel)
    * Dreiser: A Biography, (1936, non-fiction)
    * Winesburg and Others, (1937, play)
    * Home Town, (1940, novel)
    * San Francisco at Christmas, (1940, memoirs)
    * Lives of Animals, (1966, novel)
    * Return to Winesburg, Ohio, (1967, essays)
    * The Memoirs of Sherwood Anderson, (1968, memoirs)
    * No Swank, (1970, novel)
    * Perhaps Women, (1970, novel)
    * The Buck Fever Papers, (1971, essays)
    * Ten Short Plays, (1972, plays)
    * Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein: Correspondence and Personal Essays, (1972, essays)
    * Nearer the Grass Roots, (1976, novel)
    * The Writer at His Craft, (1978, non-fiction)
    * Paul Rosenfeld: Voyager in the Arts, (1978, nonfiction)
    * The Teller's Tale, (1982, novel)
    * Selected Letters: 1916 – 1933, (1984, letters)
    * Writer's Diary: 1936 - 1941, (1987, memoir)
    * Early Writings of Sherwood Anderson, (1989, short stories)
    * Love Letters to Eleanor Copenhaver Anderson, (1990, letters)
    * The Selected Short Stories of Sherwood Anderson, (1995, short stories)
    * Southern Odyssey: Selected Writings By Sherwood Anderson, (1998, short stories)

(From wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

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Poor White by Sherwood Anderson, the Pennsylvania State University, Electronic Classics Series, Jim Manis, Faculty Editor, Hazleton, PA 18202-1291 is a Portable Document File produced as part of an ongoing student publication project to bring classical works of literature, in English, to free and easy access of those wishing to make use of them.

Cover Design: Jim Manis
Copyright © 2007 The Pennsylvania State University
The Pennsylvania State University is an equal opportunity university.

BOOK I
CHAPTER I

HUGH MCVEY was born in a little hole of a town stuck on a mud bank on the western shore of the Mississippi River in the State of Missouri. It was a miserable place in which to be born. With the exception of a narrow strip of black mud along the river, the land for ten miles back from the town—called in derision by river men “Mudcat Landing”—was almost entirely worthless and unproductive.

The soil, yellow, shallow and stony, was tilled, in Hugh’s time, by a race of long gaunt men who seemed as exhausted and no-account as the land on which they lived. They were chronically discouraged, and the merchants and artisans of the town were in the same state. The merchants, who ran their stores—poor tumble-down ramshackle affairs—on the credit system, could not get pay for the goods they handed out over their counters and the artisans, the shoemakers, carpenters and harnessmakers, could not get pay for the work they did. Only the town’s two saloons prospered. The saloon keepers sold their wares for cash and, as the men of the town and the farmers who drove into town felt that without drink life was unbearable, cash always could be found for the purpose of getting drunk.

Hugh McVey’s father, John McVey, had been a farm hand in his youth but before Hugh was born had moved into town to find employment in a tannery. The tannery ran for a year or two and then failed, but John McVey stayed in town. He also became a drunkard.

It was the easy obvious thing for him to do. During the time of his employment in the tannery he had been married and his son had been born. Then his wife died and the idle workman took his child and went to live in a tiny fishing shack by the river. How the boy lived through the next few years no one ever knew. John McVey loitered in the streets and on the river bank and only awakened out of his habitual stupor when, driven by hunger or the craving for drink, he went for a day’s work in some farmer’s field at harvest time or joined a number of other idlers for an adventurous trip down river on a lumber raft. The baby was left shut up in the shack by the river or carried about wrapped in a soiled blanket. Soon after he was old enough to walk he was compelled to find work in order that he might eat.

The boy of ten went listlessly about town at the heels of his father. The two found work, which the boy did while the man lay sleeping in the sun. They cleaned cisterns, swept out stores and saloons and at night went with a wheelbarrow and a box to remove and dump in the river the contents of out-houses. At fourteen Hugh was as tall as his father and almost without education. He could read a little and could write his own name, had picked up these accomplishments from other boys who came to fish with him in the river, but he had never been to school. For days sometimes he did nothing but lie half asleep in the shade of a bush on the river bank.

The fish he caught on his more industrious days he sold for a few cents to some housewife, and thus got money to buy food for his big growing indolent body. Like an animal that has come to its maturity he turned away from his father, not because of resentment for his hard youth, but because he thought it time to begin to go his own way. ...

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