Poor White

Sherwood Anderson knew this material from the inside. He grew up in Clyde, Ohio, a town about the size of the one he invents in this book, and he spent his thirties running a paint company in Elyria, Ohio, before walking out of the office in 1912 to become a writer. Poor White is his third novel, and the book he published immediately after Winesburg, Ohio had made his name. B. W. Huebsch, the small New York house that had taken Winesburg when no established publisher would risk it, brought it out in 1920.

The novel puts dates on the change it describes, which is part of its argument. Hugh McVey leaves Missouri in September 1886. Steve Hunter organises Bidwell's first factory company in 1892. By the last chapter the town has grown a foundry, a bicycle plant, a tool-machine works, streets of identical frame houses, an Italian and Greek and Polish labour force, two strikes and a plan for an automobile-tire factory. One man's working life covers the whole distance from a town where everybody knew everybody to a town where nobody does.

Poor White also has a place in the story of Paris, for a reason that has nothing to do with Ohio. It was the newest thing Anderson had published when he met an unknown twenty-two-year-old named Ernest Hemingway in Chicago in 1921 and wrote him the letters of introduction to Gertrude Stein and Sylvia Beach that opened literary Paris to him. Five years later Hemingway spent a whole short book, The Torrents of Spring, making fun of the way Anderson wrote.

The first two chapters are a childhood. Hugh McVey is born at Mudcat Landing, a Missouri river town on a mud bank, and raised in a fishing shack by John McVey, a farm hand who has given up work for drink. At fourteen Hugh gets a job sweeping the platform at the new railway station, and Sarah Shepard, the station master's wife, takes him into her house, buys a speller and an arithmetic at the town store, and appoints herself his teacher. She is a New Englander by descent and she despises the town. She tells Hugh over and over that his own people are lazy, shiftless, poor white trash, and that his habit of lying in the sun doing nothing is a sin. He believes her. When the Shepards leave for Michigan he inherits the telegraph job, then gives it up and works his way east through Illinois, Indiana and Ohio as a farm hand, a carpenter's helper and a section hand, sleeping badly and talking to nobody.

He arrives in Bidwell, Ohio, at twenty-three, as telegraph operator at a country station a mile north of town, at a spot called Pickleville after a pickle factory that has closed. The town cannot make him out. Hugh sits alone doing arithmetic to keep himself from daydreaming, and one spring he starts hiding in a fence corner at night to watch the sons and daughters of a cabbage farmer named Ezra French crawl up and down the fields setting plants by hand. He decides to build a machine that will do it, and when he crawls into the field himself to work out the arm movements, the terrified French children take him for a ghost and refuse to work at night again.

Word of the strange man at the station reaches Steve Hunter, a jeweller's son just back from business college in Buffalo with one ambition, which is to be the first manufacturer in Bidwell. Cornered by two older men in the back room of the bank, Steve claims the inventor is already working for him, then walks out to Pickleville in a panic to make the claim true. Hugh signs a contract for a ten per cent royalty and fifty dollars a month, and the town, which has been listening for two years to an old man who had been a carpetbag governor in the South predicting that factories are coming, empties its savings into the Bidwell Plant-Setting Machine Company. Among the subscribers is Joseph Wainsworth, the harness maker, who puts in twelve hundred dollars — his whole savings from twenty years at the bench.

Two things run alongside that story. One is Clara Butterworth, the daughter of Tom Butterworth, the county's richest farmer and Steve's partner: a strong, direct young woman who is mauled by a farm hand in a wagon shed at seventeen, accused by her father of inviting it, and sent to the state university at Columbus, where she meets a socialist classmate called Kate Chanceller and begins to think about what a woman's life is for. The other is Joe Wainsworth, watching factory-made harness arrive in the town where his trade used to be his own.