As the interpreter of Middle Western life, Sherwood Anderson holds a supreme position among American novelists.  Poor White, like Winesburg, Ohio (No. 104 in the Modern Library), became immediately upon its appearance the forerunner of a vital school of contemporary writing.  This story of new forces, creating cities overnight, making men rich and powerful or poor and rejected, takes its origin directly from our own soil and from the American way of life with all the natural- ness and humanity for which Anderson has become world celebrated.