Rediscovering Lost Literary Treasures of the American Midwest

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From Atlas Obscura:

Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio is  a classic of American literature for its evocation of small-town life. But few people have heard of Anderson’s Poor White, published just a year later.

The release of Winesburg, Ohio’s spare short stories in 1919 made Anderson famous, while the sprawling novel Poor White has been mostly overlooked. Now, though, it’s coming back into print, as one of the first books in a new series, Belt Revivals, that aims to resurrect “classic, unjustly forgotten Midwestern titles” and introduce them to new readers.

Anderson’s novel is an “odd book but a great one,” says writer John Lingan in the new edition’s introduction. Reading Poor White after Winesburg, Ohio “feels like leaving a one-room log cabin for a taxidermy-festooned hunting lodge; there’s a shared sensibility, a familiar woodsy style, but the scope and intention aren’t even comparable.”

Poor White follows Hugh McVey, who begins life as an oafish layabout, to the industrializing Midwest of the late 19th century. He’s a country boy in search of a tidy town to host his growing ambitions, and he’s the sort who takes notice of the roar of the Mississippi River and the rolling landscape. “One of the greatest pleasures of Poor White is Anderson’s crystallization of his native Midwest at the very moment of its romantic enshrining,” Lingan writes.

. . . .

Ultimately, though, the main reason to republish these books is that they’re worth reading. Poor White might be thought of as a “flawed masterpiece,” Trubek says—the plot gets weird—but the writing is vivid, compelling, and revealing. “We are really interested in fabulous writing,” Trubek says. “People think a regional press has to be booster-ish or sentimental or not that sophisticated. There’s no reason for that to be the case.”

Link to the rest at Atlas Obscura

2 thoughts on “Rediscovering Lost Literary Treasures of the American Midwest”

  1. “Ultimately, though, the main reason to republish these books is that they’re worth reading.”

    Or ‘Belt Publishing’ hopes it can make a buck off what seems to be public domain pieces …

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