"Шервуд Андерсен. Белый бедняк (engl) " - читать интересную книгу автора

and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team




[Note: The evident misprint of Book Six for Book Five in the original
is preserved here.]


POOR WHITE


A NOVEL BY

SHERWOOD ANDERSON

AUTHOR OF

WINESBURG, OHIO





TO

TENNESSEE MITCHELL ANDERSON




BOOK I




CHAPTER I


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
discouraged, 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