SOURCE: Anderson, David D. “Sherwood Anderson's Poor White and the Grotesques Become Myth.” Midamerica 14 (1987): 89-100.

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...