Poor White: A Novel

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 b...

Hugh McVey left the town of Mudcat Landing in early September of the year eighteen eighty-six. He was then twenty years old and was six feet and four inches tall. The whole uppe...

Bidwell, Ohio, was an old town as the ages of towns go in the Central West, long before Hugh McVey, in his search for a place where he could penetrate the wall that shut him off...

Hugh McVey was twenty-three years old when he went to live in Bidwell. The position of telegraph operator at the Wheeling station a mile north of town became vacant and, through...

Hugh's first inventive effort stirred the town of Bidwell deeply. When word of it ran about, the men who had been listening to the talk of Judge Horace Hanby and whose minds had...

Steve Hunter decided that it was time something was done to wake up his native town. The call of the spring wind awoke something in him as in Hugh. It came up from the south bri...

Modern men and women who live in industrial cities are like mice that have come out of the fields to live in houses that do not belong to them. They live within the dark walls o...

When Clara Butterworth, the daughter of Tom Butterworth, was eighteen years old she graduated from the town high school. Until the summer of her seventeenth year, she was a tall...

The Woodburns of Columbus were wealthy by the standards of their day. They lived in a large house and kept two carriages and four servants, but had no children. Henderson Woodbu...

Clara Butterworth left Bidwell, Ohio, in September of the year in which Steve Hunter's plant-setting machine company went into the hands of a receiver, and in January of the nex...

If many things had happened to Clara Butterworth in the three years since that day when John May so rudely tripped her first hesitating girlish attempt to run out to life, thing...

After the success of his corn cutting machine and the apparatus for unloading coal cars that brought him a hundred thousand dollars in cash, Hugh could not remain the isolated f...

Hugh first saw Clara Butterworth one day in July when she had been at home for a month. She came to his shop late one afternoon with her father and a man who had been employed t...

Hugh had no suspicion that Clara had him under consideration as a possible husband. He knew nothing about her, but after she went away he began to think. She was a woman and goo...

Hugh and Clara were married in less than a week after their first walk together. A chain of circumstances touching their two lives hurled them into marriage, and the opportunity...

As he stood alone in the barnyard, excited at the thought of the adventure on which Clara and Hugh had set out, Jim Priest remembered Tom Butterworth. For more than thirty years...

As in most older American homes, the kitchen at the rear of the Butterworth farmhouse was large and comfortable. Much of the life of the house had been led there. Clara sat in a...

Jim Priest was very drunk, but insisted on hitching a team to the Butterworth carriage and driving it loaded with guests to town. Every one laughed at him, but he drove up to th...

On the day after the feast managed by Tom and Jim, it was Tom who brought Hugh back to live with his wife. The older man had come to the farmhouse on the next morning bringing t...

It was a hot, dusty day, a week after Hugh's marriage to Clara, and Hugh was at work in his shop at Bidwell. How many days, weeks, and months he had already worked there, thinki...

It was a summer night in Ohio and the wheat in the long, flat fields that stretched away to the north from the town of Bidwell was ripe for the cutting. Between the wheat fields...

The car driven by Tom Butterworth stopped at a town, and Tom got out to fill his pockets with cigars and incidentally to enjoy the wonder and admiration of the citizens. He was...

One day in the month of October, four years after the time of his first motor ride with Clara and Tom, Hugh went on a business trip to the city of Pittsburgh. He left Bidwell in...