Other editions of book Poor White

Hugh McVey is an inventor who moves from Missouri to Bidwell, Ohio. He creates a mechanical cabbage planter to ease the workload of farmers, but an investor exploits his product. His next invention, a corn cutter, makes him a fortune and transforms the small town in Ohio into a center of manufacturing. McVey, lonely and ruminative, meets Clara Butterworth, who attends Ohio State. Published one year after the short story collection Winesburg, Ohio, this novel has a modernist style and a realist attention to everyday life, and holds a significant amount of contemporary resonance.

Hugh McVey is an inventor who moves from Missouri to Bidwell, Ohio. He creates a mechanical cabbage planter to ease the workload of farmers, but an investor exploits his product. His next invention, a corn cutter, makes him a fortune and transforms the small town in Ohio into a center of manufacturing. McVey, lonely and ruminative, meets Clara Butterworth, who attends Ohio State. Published one year after the short story collection Winesburg, Ohio, this novel has a modernist style and a realist attention to everyday life, and holds a significant amount of contemporary resonance.

Purchase one of 1st World Library's Classic Books and help support our free internet library of downloadable eBooks. Visit us online at www.1stWorldLibrary.ORG - - 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 dis-couraged, 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.

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In the United States, Poor White (or Poor Whites of the South for clarity) is the historical classification for an American sociocultural group, of European descent, with origins in the Southern United States and in Appalachia. They first emerged as a social caste in the Antebellum South, consisting of white, agrarian, economically disadvantaged laborers or squatters usually possessing neither land nor slaves. In certain contemporary contexts the term is still used to pertain to their descendants; regardless of present economic status. While similar to other White Americans in ancestry, the Poor White differ notably in regard to their history and culture.Throughout American history the Poor White have regularly been identified in differentiating terms;[8] the majority of which are often considered disparaging. They have been known as rednecks (especially in modern context), hillbillies in Appalachia, crackers in Georgia, and poor white trash. In the past the very use of the term, "Poor White," by the white Southern elite, who considered it an oxymoron, was to distance themselves from elements of society they viewed as "undesirable," "lesser" or "antisocial." It denoted a separation, reflective of a social hierarchy, with "poor" used to demonstrate a low position, while "white" was used to subjugate rather than to classify. Yet author Wayne Flynt in his book, Dixie's Forgotten People: The South's Poor Whites, argues that "one difficulty in defining poor whites stems from the diverse ways in which the phrase has been used. It has been applied to economic and social classes as well to cultural and ethical values." While other

Hugh McVey is an inventor who moves from Missouri to Bidwell, Ohio. He creates a mechanical cabbage planter to ease the workload of farmers, but an investor exploits his product. His next invention, a corn cutter, makes him a fortune and transforms the small town in Ohio into a center of manufacturing. McVey, lonely and ruminative, meets Clara Butterworth, who attends Ohio State. Published one year after the short story collection Winesburg, Ohio, this novel has a modernist style and a realist attention to everyday life, and holds a significant amount of contemporary resonance.

Excerpt from Poor White: A NovelIn his fourteenth year and when the boy was on the point of sinking into the sort of animal-like stupor in which his father had lived, something happened to him. A railroad pushed its way down along the river to his town and he got a job as man of all work for the station master. He swept out the station, put trunks on trains, mowed the grass in the station yard and helped in a hundred odd ways the man who held the combined jobs of ticket seller, baggage master and telegraph operator at the little out-of-the-way place.Hugh began a little to awaken. He lived with his employer, Henry Shepard, and his wife, Sarah Shep ard, and for the first time in his life sat down regularly at table. His life, lying on the river bank through long summer afternoons or sitting perfectly still for endless hours in a boat, had bred in him a dreamy detached outlook on life. He found it hard to be definite and to do definite things, but for all his stupid ity the boy had a great store of patience, a heritage perhaps from his mother. In his new place the sta tion master's wife, Sarah Shepard, a sharp-tongued, good-natured woman, who hated the town and the people among whom fate had thrown her, scolded at him all day long. She treated him like a child of six, told him how to sit at table, how to hold his fork when he ate, how to address who came to thehouse or to the station. The mother in her was aroused by Hugh's helplessness and, having no chil dren of her own, she began to take the tall awkward boy to her heart. She was a small woman and when she stood in the house scolding the great stupid boy who stared down at her with his small perplexed eyes, the two made a picture that afforded endless amuse ment to her husband, a short fat bald-headed man who went about clad in blue overalls and a blue cotton shirt. Coming to the back door of his house, that was within a stone's throw of the station, Henry Shepard stood with his hand on the door-jamb and watched the woman and the boy. Above the scolding voice of the woman his own voice arose. Look out, Hugh, he called. Be on the jump, lad! Perk yourself up. She'll be biting you if you don't go mighty careful in there.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.