Experts

In literature

Evelyn Greenleaf Sutherland’s play Po’ White Trash, published in 1900, exposes complicated cultural tensions in the post-Reconstruction South, at the heart of which is the racial status of poor whites.^[15]
In Sherwood Anderson‘s 1920 novel Poor White, a Southerner who thinks of himself as “poor white trash” makes his way as an inventor in a small Midwestern town.
In Margaret Mitchell‘s 1936 novel Gone with the Wind, and the 1939 movie by the same name, the term is used several times, always pejoratively, by both the black and the white characters. Neighbor Emmie Slattery is described by Mammy as “poor white trash” when Ellen O’Hara goes to midwife her illegitimate baby.
Zora Neale Hurston‘s Seraph on the Suwanee (1948) explores images of ‘white trash’ women. Jackson (2000) argues that Hurston’s meditation on abjection, waste, and the construction of class and gender identities among poor whites reflects the eugenics discourses of the 1920s.^[16]
In William Faulkner‘s 1953 novel Requiem for a Nun, Ratcliffe is described as “father of an equally long and pure line of white trash tenant farmers”.
In Harper Lee‘s 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird, the dangerous Ewell family is referred to as “white trash”.
In Maya Angelou‘s 1969 autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, she mentioned that the “powhitetrash” kids would come from down the hills and cause trouble at her grandmother’s store in Stamps, Arkansas.

Content derived from: White Trash