The Store
by T. S. Stribling
Summary
Miltiades Vaiden was a colonel in the Confederate army and a Klan leader during Reconstruction, and by 1884, when the novel opens, he is a poor white man in Florence, Alabama, working for a merchant he despises and nursing a ledger of grievances the town has stopped hearing about. Then he gets his hands on capital, by means the reader watches and the town half suspects, and sets up as a storekeeper himself.
The store is the whole engine of the New South in miniature. Freedmen have become sharecroppers and tenant farmers, credit is the new instrument of control, and Miltiades cheats Black customers and desperate white ones with the same courtly manner, building himself into a figure of substance one season's cotton at a time.
The other line of the book belongs to Gracie, a woman born to an enslaved mother and a white father, and her son Toussaint, who is light enough to pass for white and does, sometimes, in a town where that is a dangerous experiment. Toussaint runs up against the law, and a white mob lynches him along with other Black men. Gracie and Vaiden find his body hanging in the centre of town, and the next day she leaves for the North.
Stribling writes it dry and unhurried, closer to social anatomy than to melodrama, with property disputes, church politics and gossip carrying most of the weight until they suddenly cannot.
Around five hundred and seventy pages.
Best for readers who want to see what Southern fiction looked like immediately before Faulkner redefined it, from a writer taking the region's economics seriously.
Historical Context & Significance
The Store won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1933, cited for its sustained interest and its convincing and comprehensive picture of Southern small town life in the 1880s. Robert Coates in The New Yorker compared Stribling to Mark Twain for his ability to convey the life and movement of a small Southern town.
It is the middle book of the Vaiden trilogy. The Forge begins at the outbreak of the Civil War, and Unfinished Cathedral, published in 1934, carries the family into the 1920s. The University of Alabama Press has kept all three in print since the mid 1980s.
T. S. Stribling was a bestselling and seriously reviewed novelist in the early 1930s and is nearly unread now, which makes him a genuine curiosity of this list: a writer the prize caught at his peak whose reputation the following decade simply removed. Faulkner covered the same country, the same decades and the same racial machinery within a few years, and comparison has been unkind to Stribling ever since.