Laughing Stock

T.S. Stribling (1881-1965) was an American writer and lawyer. Born in Tennessee, he was raised in a family of divided loyalties--his father, Christopher Columbus Stribling, fought for the Union Army, while his mother's family had sided with the Confederacy. In 1902, Stribling graduated from the Florence Normal School with a teaching certificate before moving to Tuscaloosa, Alabama to work as a teacher. In 1905, having abandoned his teaching career, he graduated with a law degree from the University of Alabama. Despite earning a good job, he left within two years after his use of office supplies to write fiction was discovered. He gained a reputation as an author of adventure stories for boys, detective fiction, and science fiction tales. In 1922, he published Birthright, a novel addressing themes of race and identity in the aftermath of Reconstruction. In 1930, he published The Forge, the first novel in his lauded Vaiden Trilogy. The Store (1932), the second novel in the series, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and remains Stribling's most enduring achievement. The Vaiden Trilogy, which concluded with Unfinished Cathedral (1934), is a sweeping historical study tracing three generations of the Vaiden family from Florence, Alabama. Although his novels were acclaimed by critics and such authors as William Faulkner, Stribling's reputation--once at the forefront of the Southern Literary Renaissance--has largely faded in the decades since his death and undoubtedly deserves reassessment.