[In the following essay, Anderson describes the mythic qualities of Poor White.]

When the Modern Library edition of Sherwood Anderson's Poor White was published in 1926, Sherwood Anderson wrote—a rare occasion in the Modern Library series—his own introduction to the novel. He wrote not for a new generation of readers but for those who had not read the book in the more than five years since its original publication. In the introduction, he talked frankly about Poor White as he had seen it while writing it, as the critics understood it when it appeared, and as he saw it five years later.

Earlier, in 1920, he had summed up his view of what he thought he had done in the novel in a letter to Jerome and Lucile Blum. At that time he wrote “The new novel [Poor White], out in October, will, I hope, build up the country about Winesburg, sweep Winesburg into the modern industrial life, show what made it an Akron, Ohio.”

Five years later, however, he had undergone several major transitions in his life: he had abandoned Chicago, New York, and New Orleans for the hill country of western Virginia, divorced Tennessee Mitchell and married Elizabeth Prall, and rejected the spirit of liberation that a decade earlier he had thought was so important; furthermore, in that five years he had published two novels, two volumes of stories, and a volume of memoirs, and he had a fictionalized autobiography of his childhood ready for publication. From this new perspective, he began to review the experience of Modern Library publication, and then turned to the book itself:

There is this book, Poor White—now to be published in The Modern Library, tricked out in a new dress, going to call on new people. The Modern Library is something magnificent. Long rows of names—illustrious names. My book, Poor White, feels a little like a countryman going to live in a great modern sophisticated city.

The book becomes now—well, let us say a house in a vast city.

With this new perspective, from experience, from writing, from the Virginia hills, he saw that Poor White was not merely the biography of a town as it became an industrial city as he had written to the Blums, but that, like Winesburg, Ohio, it was primarily about people:

Who lives in the house?

I began reciting names … Jim Priest, the farm hand who admired General Grant … Rose McCoy, the school teacher … Hugh McVey … Clara Butterworth … Steve Hunter, an early Rotarian … Sara Shepard … Joe Wainsworth …

I tried to put down the things you did to each other and the people about you and what other people, what life itself did to you.

Earlier, when he finished the novel and tried to assess his accomplishment, he recognized now, he had seen the appearance of the novel rather than its reality, the town rather than its people:

There was a town in the state of Ohio. The town was really the hero of the book. After Poor White was published none of the critics spoke of that. What happened to the town was, I thought, more important than what happened to the people of the town.

Why—well, because I presumed I realized all the time that after Joe, Jim, Clara and the others had been forgotten new people would be living in the town.

Five years later, however, Anderson knew that while his fictional town would continue to grow, to change to something no longer recognizable for what it had been, the people, those whom he had created and placed there were fixed in time and place, durable rather than ephemeral:

I sat in the back room of a saloon among sailors and while they talked of the sea little Joe Wainsworth killed Jim Gibson in a harness shop in the Ohio town. I was on the deck of a boat in the Gulf of Mexico and there came that moment when Hugh McVey crept out of his wife's bedroom. On another day I was in a quiet residence street at night. It was dark. I went along swinging my stick. People passed—knowing nothing.

And all the time as I walked that tall gaunt man, Hugh McVey, was creeping in the cabbage field at the edge of town, back in Ohio—that night when he frightened the French boys so that they ran away …

How much of all I felt, saw, knew of my people of my town, of the people of my fancy finally got into the book?

That you, the reader, will have to decide. Here is the book. I cannot change it now. It is very close to me and at the same time very far away.

In this introduction Anderson was not only closer to the novel and more understanding of what he had done at any time since he put the last words on paper, but he would never return to it in such intimacy again. Unfortunately, however, not only has this introduction almost uniformly been overlooked by critics and scholars, but the book, then and now, has continued to be seen as the biography of a Midwestern town in transition from its nineteenth century origins as the trading center of an agricultural region to its new twentieth century role as an industrial complex in a new technological age.

That dimension of the book is certainly important: it is, without question, the best fictional account of that transition that we have, and it does indeed show, as Anderson wrote, Winesburg as it became another Akron. But to accept that interpretation is, as Anderson recognized and tried to communicate to the readers of a new, inexpensive edition, to ignore or overlook the novel's most durable, most memorable dimension, that of the people of Bidwell. Like those of Winesburg, the people of Bidwell are memorable for their very humanity; they are durable in their attempts to express it, to define it, to make their indelible marks on the fragile pages that preserve the history of the evolution of their time and place.

Poor White is indeed the story of Winesburg become another Akron and of the creation of the American twentieth century. But it is also the story of those who came out of the nineteenth century, pursuing a humanistic ideal, only to create at the same time a new materialism and a new dimension of the perennial Midwestern—American—search for an elusive personal fulfillment. It is, in other words, the story of the two competing ideals of the eighteenth century that had been carried across the mountains and down the rivers in the early years of the nineteenth century to make of the Old West as it became the Midwest an intellectual—and often personal—battleground that would ultimately define the nature of the region and the nation in what we had, until recently, called the American century.

But Poor White is neither intellectual nor economic history. It is, like Winesburg, Ohio, the story of its people, and its substance is the intensity of their experience as twentieth century America became reality, as the Hamiltonian definition of progress fused with New England Puritan values to smash forever the Jeffersonian dream of a self-sufficient society of farmers and craftsmen, united by their common human dignity. For Anderson, the competing ideals, carried across the mountains and up the rivers by the men and women who sought order and fulfillment in a new land had, by the end of the 1860s, through the already mythical figures of Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan, made a permanent mark on the national psyche. As the novel opens, the ideal of human freedom shared by Jefferson and Hamilton alike had become an attainable reality.

The story of the town and its people begins at that great nineteenth century social and cultural watershed in Midwestern—and American—history. Anderson describes that moment in detail in its human, its individual, its personal dimension:

In all the towns of mid-western America it was a time of waiting. The country having been cleared and the Indians driven away into a vast distant place spoken of vaguely as the West, the Civil War having been fought and won, and there being no great national problems that touched closely their lives, the minds of men were turned in upon themselves. The soul and its destiny was spoken of openly on the streets. Robert Ingersoll came to Bidwell to speak in Terry's Hall, and after he had gone the question of the divinity of Christ for months occupied the minds of the citizens. Then ministers preached sermons on the subject, and in the evening it was talked about in the stores. Every one had something to say. Even Charley Mook, who dug ditches, who stuttered so that not a half dozen people in town could understand him, expressed his opinion. …

… everyone knew his neighbor and was known to him. Strangers did not come and go swiftly and mysteriously and there was no constant and confusing roar of machinery and of new projects afoot. For the moment mankind seemed about to take time to try to understand itself.

It was to Bidwell at this time that Hugh McVey had come in 1889, at the age of twenty-three, in search of the most mundane manifestation of fulfillment: a job as telegrapher and agent at the Wheeling and Lake Erie station at Pickleville, a mile north of town. Behind him McVey left the early nineteenth century past: the sleepy Mississippi River town of Mudcat Landing, Missouri, and the primitive frontier roots of Mark Twain and Huckleberry Finn, of Thomas Lincoln, of those who pursued their happiness in the territories, of those who, in Anderson's words in Winesburg, Ohio, sought their fulfillment in an environment characterized by an “old brutal ignorance that had in it also a kind of beautiful childlike innocence.”

But McVey, like Abraham Lincoln two generations earlier, becomes a townsman, and in so doing, becomes, again like Lincoln, a catalyst that unwittingly brings about a new American reality. Whereas Lincoln, however, had sought order and justice through law, a decision consciously arrived at, McVey fell under the influence of those who were to transform the Jeffersonian agrarian democracy into a Hamiltonian economic oligarchy. In turn, after having fallen under that influence, essentially the sense of guilt and of fear that had come across the mountains from New England to the Old Northwest, McVey became a tinkerer and a catalyst in the tradition of Edison and Henry Ford, and like them, he was to reshape the lives of the people in the town and beyond.

The impact of New England morality on McVey and through him on generations of Midwesterners is personified in Sarah Shepard, the first of the grotesques become myth, the motherly woman become the image of the New England conscience brooding over the Ohio countryside. When Sarah, the New England-born wife of Henry Shepard, the stationmaster, took over the direction of Hugh's life at fourteen, much as the Widow Douglas had attempted to take over Huckleberry Finn's, to “sivilize” him through imposition of the Puritan virtues of hard work, thrift, sobriety, and guilt that would bring success, Sarah herself takes on mythic proportions as the force who, single-handedly, will transform the brutal ignorance of the Old Western frontier to the orderly countryside of the new Midwest. To Sarah it was no less than her duty: “When a job has to be done,” she tells Hugh, “there's no use putting it off. It's going to be hard work to make an educated man of you, but it has to be done.” To her, idleness—which she called laziness—was evil, to be destroyed in the spirit, and her words rang in her head for the rest of his life:

“It's a sin to be so dreamy and worthless.”

Like Edison, born on the bank of Ohio's Huron River, Hugh becomes a telegrapher, and his riverbank dreaminess is transformed to a practical imagination useful to the new age. As a telegrapher, as a tinkerer, he came to Bidwell, on Ohio's rich agricultural lake plain as, Anderson notes, the time of waiting was coming to and end, and the town, the region, and the nation had determined the course of the future:

New talk ran through the town. A new force that was being born into American life … was feeding on the old dying individual life. … It was meant to seal men together, to wipe out national lines, to walk under seas and fly through the air. …

The wise old men of the town began to see the lives of the people in new terms. To Judge Hanby, the future was clear:

In England, he explained, the cities were constantly growing larger, and already almost every one either worked in a factory or owned stock in a factory. “In New England it is getting the same way fast,” he explained. “The same thing'll happen here. Farming'll be done with tools. Almost everything now done by hand'll be done by machinery. Some'll grow rich and some poor. The thing is to get educated, yes, sir, that's the thing, to get ready for what's coming. It's the only way. The younger generation has got to be sharper and shrewder.”

While at Pickleville, Hugh McVey watches the cabbage-planters in the fields along the railroad tracks and begins to tinker and a rich farmer, Tom Butterworth, sends his daughter Clara off to the state university in Columbus, another old man, a refugee in the town from New York City and post-Civil War Reconstruction in the South, sees the new age somewhat differently:

“Well, there's going to be a new war here,” he said. “It won't be like the Civil War, just shooting off guns and killing people's bodies. At first its going to be a war between individuals to see to what class a man must belong; then its going to be a long, silent war between classes, between those who have and those who can't get. It'll be the worst war of all.”

Life in the town, imbued with the spirit of the new age, began to take on an air of excitement. McVey produced a workable planting machine, to the curiosity of the town and the enthusiasm of its men of affairs, and Anderson recreates the town's commitment to what could be, and, for many of them, would be:

The air of Bidwell began to stir with talk of new times. The evil things said of the new life coming were soon forgotten. The youth and optimistic spirit of the country led it to take hold of the hand of the giant, industrialism, and led him laughing into the land. The cry, “get on in the world,” that ran all over America at that period … rang in the streets of Bidwell.

But for Joe Wainsworth, the journeyman harness-maker, perhaps a shadow image of Anderson's technologically-displaced father, insulted by a request to repair shoddy machine-made harnesses, the future would belong, as had the past, to the conscientious skilled craftsman:

During the afternoon, after he had heard of the four factory-made work harnesses brought into what he had always thought of as a trade that belonged to him by the rights of a first-class workman, Joe remained silent for two or three hours. He thought of the words of old Judge Hanby and the constant talk of the new times coming. Turning suddenly to his apprentice … he broke into words. He was defiant and expressed his defiance. “Well, then, let'em go to Phildelphia, let'em go any damn place they please. … I know my trade and do not have to bow to any man,” he declared. He expressed the old tradesman's faith in his craft and the rights it gave the tradesman. “Learn your trade. Don't listen to talk,” he said earnestly. “The man who knows his trade is a man. He can tell every one to go to the devil.”

But the machine-made harnesses continue to arrive at the Bidwell freight station, and they appear increasingly on the streets and the country roads, even as Bidwell's first factory, to manufacture McVey's planting machine and the other inventions to follow, rises along the railroad tracks. While Wainsworth mutters at his work and on the streets, a model of the planter appears, to the joy of the townspeople. But it drew, too, the denunciation of Ezra French, who had planted cabbage plants by hand all his life, twisting his body permanently in the process, and whose sons were to follow his path:

“The thing, you see, can't be done. It aint right. Something awful'll happen. The rains won't come and the plants'll dry up and die. It'll be like it was in Egypt in the Bible times. … Don't it say in the Bible men shall work and labor by the sweat of their brows? Can a machine like that sweat? You know it can't. And it can't do the work either. No, siree. Men've got to do it. … It ain't right. That's what I say and all your smart talk ain't a'going to change me.”

With the failure of the planting machine and of the company formed to manufacture it, to French, to Wainsworth, to the handful of other sceptics, it appears that justice and tradition will prevail, even at the cost of the savings of much of the town. But the corn-cutting machine and the coal-unloading machine that McVey invents are successes, the town flourishes, factories are built, farm hands become factory hands, and foreigners appear on the streets. The tinkerer, still practical, becomes rich, as do the town's men of affairs. The young men of the town are captured by the spirit of the new age, and local varieties of the new era's dreams of conquest, of manifest destiny, of class stratification appear among them. For young Harley Parsons, son of the shoemaker and himself an apprentice blacksmith, new-found prosperity in the nearby oil fields make possible a personal victory over the old world and far places:

He came home wearing a fancy silk vest and astonished his fellows by buying and smoking ten-cent cigars. His pockets were bulging with money. “I'm not going to stay long in this town, you can bet on that,” he declared one evening as he stood, surrounded by a group of admirers before Fanny Twist's Millinery Shop on lower Main Street. “I have been with a Chinese woman, and an Italian, and with one from South America.” He took a puff on his cigar and spat on the sidewalk. “I'm going back and I'm going to make a record. Before I get through I'm going to be with a woman of every nationality on earth, that's what I'm going to do.”

But for other young men of the town, the new agression manifests itself in the economic and socal opportunities available in the town and the new age as a new social structure, compounded of money and power, begins to appear. Young Ed Hall, formerly a carpenter's apprentice in the town, becomes a foreman in the new corn-cutter factory at a salary of twenty-five dollars a week. Anderson describes the result:

It was more money than he had ever dreamed of earning in a week. On pay nights he dressed himself in his Sunday clothes and had himself shaved at Joe Trotter's barber shop. Then he went along Main Street, fingering the money in his pocket and half fearing that he would suddenly awake and find it all a dream. He went into Wymer's tobacco store to get a cigar, and old Claude Wymer came to wait on him. On the second Saturday evening after he had got his new position, the tobacconist, a rather obsequious man, called him Mr. Hall. It was the first time such a thing had happened and it upset him a little. He laughed and made a joke of it. “Don't get high and mighty,” he said, and turned to wink at the men loafing in the shop. Later he thought about the matter and was sorry he had not accepted the new title without protest. “Well, I'm foreman, and a lot of the young fellows I've always known and fooled around with will be working under me,” he told himself. “I can't be getting thick with them.”

Ed walked along the street feeling very keenly the importance of his new place in the community. Other young fellows in the factory were getting a dollar and a half a day. At the end of the week he got twenty-five dollars, almost three times as much. The money was an indication of superiority. There could be no doubt about that. …

For Joe Wainsworth, the harnessmaker, for the former farm hands, and for Peter Fry, the blacksmith, the new values and the products and the system out of which they came are incomprehensible and their effects on the townspeople deplorable, both upon those who rise in the new society and the taciturn farm hands turned factory workers whom it victimizes as they lose the dignity and the mobility that once had been theirs. For Wainsworth, the result is a grudging concession that eventually explodes into violence; for Fry, for Smoky Pete, as the town knows him, it is a new role as the town's conscience, its Jeremiah, come from his forge and his small house, threatened by expanding factories, to walk the streets of Bidwell, calling down condemnation and judgment on those corrupted by the new values. At Sandy Ferris, the housepainter taken to drink, he shouts, “You cheap thing, warming your belly with whisky while your children freeze … ;” for Pen Beck, a merchant and elder of the church, whom rumor had caught in an indiscretion that included drinking and a bout with a notorious woman of the county seat, his indignation turns to ridicule on crowded Main Street: “Well, Penny, my lad, so you went for a night among the ladies? You've been fooling around with my girl, Nell Hunt, over at the county seat …,” and to the townspeople: “He didn't commit adultery. I don't want you to think that happened. All that happened was he bit my best girl, Nell Hunter on the neck. …”

With that, Anderson recounts, “The merchant, white with anger, rushed up and struck him a blow on the chest with his small and rather fat fist. The blacksmith knocked him into the gutter and later, when he was arrested, went proudly off to the town mayor and paid his fine.”

To prosperous farmer Tom Butterworth, seen slipping into the millinery shop at night, Smoky Pete makes the source of his indignation clear: “Well, Tom Butterworth, you're fooling around with Fanny Twist. You're sneaking into her shop late at night, eh? … Are you and Fanny Twist going to open a house here? Is that the next industrial enterprise we're going to have here in this town?”

Smoky Pete, the town concludes, has gone crazy.

For one of the French boys, son of old Ezra, who had denounced McVey's first invention, another kind of disillusionment comes, and he walks along the railroad track with a group of factory hands, muttering and cursing.

… I thought I'd come to town to a factory and find it easier here. Now I've got married and have to stick to my job no matter what they do. In the country I worked like a dog a few days a year, but here I'll probably have to work like that all the time. It's the way things go. I thought it was mighty funny, all this talk about factory work being so easy. I wish the old days was back. …

For Joe Wainsworth, an abortive effort at change, at adapting himself and his craft to the machine age and its values, results in humiliation and tragedy. While socialist union organizers arrive in town to attack the Ed Halls and promise dignity to the farm hands turned factory hands, moving inexorably toward the “long, silent war between classes” predicted by the wise old man when Bidwell was a village, Wainsworth buries himself in his work and his brooding, turning the day-to-day operation of the shop to Joe Gibson, his journeyman harnessmaker. Gibson is an individualist and, like many of his contemporaries, a “spiritual bully,” who is determined to rise in the new age. But his success will not come though the hard work that had brought Wainsworth to mastery of an obsolete craft and near-despair; it will come through acquiring personal power:

… A week before, a traveling man had come to the shop to sell machine-made harness. Joe had ordered the man out and Jim had called him back. He had placed an order for eighteen sets of the harness and had made Joe sign the order. The harness had arrived that afternoon and was now hung in the shop. “It's hanging in the shop now,” Jim cried [to workmen outside in the street]. Go see for yourself.”

For Joe, humiliation was complete:

… In his hand he held his harness-maker's knife, shaped like a half moon and with an extraordinarily sharp circular edge … on the day after the incident of the placing of the order for the factory-made harness he had gone into a hardware store and bought a cheap revolver. He had been sharpening the knife as Jim talked to the workmen outside … Joy shown in his eyes [as Joe returned to work].

With one stroke, Jim is nearly decapitated, and Joe goes off into the street, the revolver in his pocket, the cries of workmen—“Hey … do you believe in factory-made harness now-days, Joe Wainsworth? Hey, what do you say? Do you sell factory-made harness?”—ringing in his ears. On a street corner he encounters Steve Hunter, the entrepreneur who had brought the new times to Bidwell; Joe shoots him dead, and dropping the revolver, flees into the woods to seek his own death.

With Joe's ultimate indignity, captured by Ed Hall, the new superintendent of the corn-planter factory, in his refuge in the woods, the subjugation of the town and its old values is complete. Those whose values were not conducive to survival in the new age, the technologically displaced craftsmen, the voices crying out against the new materialism, fade away, their cries falling mute under the triumphant whistles of the factories. The people of the old Bidwell take their places in an American Midwestern past rapidly moving from reality to myth, from childlike innocence and brutal ignorance to a pastoral paradise that never was. Living people in the novel provide the record of a period of social change, whether pointing the way, as did Sarah Shephard when she inadvertantly introduced the Puritan ethic to a primitive youth, or attempting to stop a force they do not understand, as do Ezra Frank, Smoky Pete, and Joe Wainsworth, who protested the effects of that ethic on the society they founded and in which they flourished. But each of them becomes, as the factory whistles shriek, not a living person in a town become a city, but a grotesque become myth as elusive thought become truth slips out of helpless fingers. Each becomes a vague memory, a shadowy image in a new vision of what was, and, the whistles make clear, will never be again.

For those who brought the new age into being—Hugh McVey, who made it possible, Ed Hall, who transformed the ideas of a rustic genius into bricks and mortar and whistles, Clara Butterworth, who sought a new, personal freedom and a new meaning in her marriage to McVey—the book is unended; Hugh and Clara find each other and seek a new, post-industrial fulfillment, but Hall and his cohorts are part of a newer, more brutal ignorance unmitigated by the childlike innocence of the Frenches, the Wainrights, the Jeremiahs of the Ohio countryside. Their voices, stilled, have been replaced by the harsh, impersonal whistles that suggest ultimate failure for Hugh and Clara, and final and permanent but empty victory for the Ed Hallas as the novel ends.