By Sherwood Anderson, 1920
If you like historical fiction, I recommend Poor White by Sherwood Anderson (whom you may know from Winesburg, Ohio). Published originally in 1920, it tells the story of small-town Midwestern folk in the time when farming was slowly becoming mechanized and the rural poor were becoming factory workers to produce those cornhuskers and tractors. The novel is prescient about the cycles of increasing displacement as even those factory jobs were lost to “advanced” technology. And it is prescient about the plight of “poor whites” in the Midwest today who voted to be saved in the last election. It is also good writing.
Find the book here.
