“Poor White,” published in 1920, marked a new turn in Sherwood Anderson’s career and the transition toward a new style. It is now characterized by the obsession of the subconscious and the study of morbid psychology. “Poor White” tells once more the story of a proletarian youth struggling against adverse surroundings. Like “Marching Men” this novel is autobiographical to a large extent. With Hugh McVey, the poor white, the experiments which Anderson’s previous books had described start all over again. Uprooted and revolving against his native environment, he too seeks to find an impossible felicity in the gratification of his passions. Hugh McVey has grown, like wild grass, on the shores of the Mississippi once haunted by the ghost of Huckleberry Finn, in days when boys were more addicted to “roughing it” than to brooding over their secret thoughts. The huge river inspires Hugh with a longing for a life of abundance and ease. Like all the characters in Anderson’s novels, he is the victim of inhibitions. He vegetates in the sultry atmosphere of his small town. Automatism and routine are ready to swallow him up. Luckily, he was born a craftsman and he is saved by work. He is intelligent and wilful, and turns out to be an inventor. A fortuitous circumstance takes him beyond his narrow horizon. One day, he sees people busy planting cabbages by hand. Why not build and patent a cabbage-setting machine? Hugh carries out his plans successfully and he soon finds himself at the head of a prosperous stock company; but he is dissatisfied. He has not fulfilled his spiritual longings. He denounces machinery and commercialism. He arraigns socialism because it cannot exist without them. He sees salvation only in self-reliance and in sincerity to oneself and to others. He thinks and acts, in fact, like a man who has read and appropriated to himself R. W. Emerson’s essays. Hugh marries a frigid woman who deserts him. At the end of the book we find him alone on the road to Truth. All in all, “Poor White” is painfully composed and rather badly written. Its value resides in the Freudian sketches aside from the main plot, and in the analysis of the pathological forms of sensibility.