A TOWN REMEMBERS STRIBLING'S PRIZE
     by Avon Edward Foote, University of North Alabama

Presented at The Annual Birthday Celebration honoring T.S. Stribling,
Richards Educational Center, Florence,  Alabama, March 3, 2002

(c) Copyright 2002, All Rights Reserved

In the late 1930's Lowell Thomas asked Pulitzer Prize-winning author T. S. Stribling what kind of author he was.  The radio show guest responded "an Ironist".  The smooth-throated commentator and world traveler jibed, "You mean a man who irons pants?"  Stribling quipped, "No, a man who spanks pants."

Florence, Alabama, has still not  forgotten its trip to the wood shed with author Tom Stribling, a lanky Tennessee youth when he studied at the State Normal College in Florence, Alabama at the turn of the century.  Until Tom Stribling chose Florence as his setting for The Store, she had always been the queen of small cities to her residents.  Florence folks liked to look down their long courtly-street noses at the smaller, but sometimes older, sister communities across the Tennessee River to the South.  When compared to the natives of this Northwest Alabama city, the hill men and women near North in Tennessee and near West in Mississippi were as decidedly inferior as an ordinary rabbit dog would be to a "rag-jist'-tarred" blue-nose coon dog buried near-by in Coon Dog Cemetery.

After Tom Stribling's The Store appeared 70 years ago, somehow it was never again the same in Florence.  Folks here liked to look back at the war.  Florence's sons had fought valiantly at Shiloh, Manassas, and Atlanta returning to the lead in dealing with the new realities.  'Til Tom Stribling that is.  He destroyed the myth that a superior society could come out a that vicious war blessed with civility and morality.  Post Civil War Florence was held up to the scrutiny -- Should we say ridicule? -- not just of Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia, but the whole nation.

Heaven forbid, the whole world.  Hadn't French and British readers and critics found his story of the changing South set in Florence's glaring defects to be a magnificent achievement in American literature?

The Store is a history of Miltiades Vaiden after the Civil War.  Vaiden distinguished himself as a Southern officer at Shiloh, earning honorary title of Colonel.  Soon after the war, J. Handback, a cotton merchant, went bankrupt, reneging on a considerable debt to Vaiden and leaving the Colonel almost destitute.  But, two decades later Colonel Vaiden concocts a dishonorable plan to recover his losses.

Stribling deals graphically with the social diversions and foibles of this North Alabama city whose citizens in 1920 registered 12,702 on the census.  Among the most notable are: Ponny -- the Colonel's fat and childless first wife; Sandusky -- a crippled [Stribling's term] legal aide who will soon begin study to be an attorney; Jerry Catlin -- a mystical and unsuccessful young student at the State Normal School in Florence (probably a self-portrait of Stribling although he denied it); Republican Postmaster Landers who sometimes has visions; Gracie -- Handback's mistress and her son; Alex Cady -- the poor-white sharecropper; and finally, the soon-to-be bride of Mr. Vaiden -- his new second wife is the young daughter of his old flame.

Florence citizens threatened a libel suit soon after the book appeared.  Many here felt Stribling had maliciously drawn them into the novel.  So aroused became the citizens that --  the story goes -- the Florence and Tuscumbia libraries refused to circulate the book.  Determined readers in Florence would have to join the Literary Guild or drive "cross the riber" to Sheffield, where the librarian kept an extra copy of the the book on hand under the desk just for leading society-ladies to peruse without recording their names on the circulating book's check-out card which other borrowers could then review.

The former Florence Normal student never denied the allegations of using Florence citizens as character models.  Although in a never published, 1933 letter from New York, he did acknowledge self-imposed limitations on the nature of the verbal facsimile: "I tried not to be precise in my description of Florence and the surrounding country because I was afraid somebody would not like for me to be writing precisely about his or her place, so I left it a little vague -- when you come to try to put your finger on the exact place where the action took its course."

Stribling had learned his lesson several years before while still writing short stories, setting one in Philadelphia and giving the correct address of one of his characters.  "The person at that address was highly incensed, although I said nothing disrespectful in the least.  This person didn't want to be pointed out."

In the same 1933 letter, he recalled his inspiration for The Forge, which preceded The Store in the Stribling trilogy.  T. S. Wrote, "My mother was born at Gravelly Springs, Alabama sixteen miles Northwest of Florence and I spent my summers with my maternal grandfather's family ever since I was a baby until I was sixteen or seventeen years old.  Nearly every one of the incidents of The Forge was told to me by my uncle, Lee Waits.  He was a fountain of perpetual entertainment all through my childhood and adolescense.  My mother also supplied endless material for the book, talking to me and telling about the Civil War days."

But after the Florence citizens with anger and fervency attacked the trilogy, especially The Store, he found it necessary to start his next book, The Soundwagon (1935), with this disclaimer: "The author of this book need hardly state in a story of this description that he has not copied any of the characters herein described from life.  On the contrary the characters are so generalized that one could say much more truthfully that life has copied the characters in this novel."

In an interview published in the May, 1932 issue of The Writer, Stribling acknowledged the "reality" of his fiction.  He told interviewer Ulysses Walsh, "My latest novel, The Store, which was handed just a few weeks ago to my publishers as a follow-up to The Forge deals with much the same situation as that going on right now in Alabama, where Negro share croppers' are being unmercifully bulldozed and persecuted."

A student reviewer had trouble with the idea that The Store's setting was really the town where he had chosen to attend college.  He wrote, "he seems to give the impression, by his detailed account, that he is painting a complete picture of Florence.  Maybe he is, but we rather hate to believe it."

But, older residents knew the sub-plots and incidents belonged here.  One remembered that there had been a lynching in 1872 providing the final scene in The Store.

A few in Florence -- actually a very few 70 years ago -- were proud of  T. S. Stribling and what he had done to bring fame to Florence's State Normal School by winning the 1933 Pulitzer Prize.  If anyone in Florence lauded Tom, it was his former professor, Miss Janet Simpson, to whom he dedicated a 1924 book, Red Sand.  Recalling his days as her student, she would write shortly before her death, "I regarded him then, as I do now, as a genius, trusting his own intuitions utterly, guided by his whims, if you might call them so, but dead sure they could not lead him astray.  Life was as interesting to him as one of his own novels."

He was as selective in what he did then in college as he was in what he would write about later in life.  Miss Simpson remembered him as capable of brilliant work in subjects he liked, completely ignoring all others.  In her words, he became "a problem in college".  She added, "Just how he passed finals in science, . . . whether his science teacher had softening of heart or whether Tom Stribling really bent to it for a short time, and learned enough to pass, I'll never know, but he graduated . . ."

After earning his diploma at the State Normal (SNS), Stribling received a law degree from the University of Alabama.  In partnership with Emmet O'Neal, former Governor of Alabama, he opened an office on Intelligence Row, a short street of office buildings opposite Courthouse Square in Florence.  The gnarled mulberry trees across the street in the Square guarding the entrances to the lawyers' and doctors' offices were vividly sketched in The Store.

The partnership with O'Neal ended in just eight months.  Abruptly concluding the arrangement, Stribling went off to sell fertilizer -- saying that he was becoming a drummer, the term used at that time for a wholesale representative.

In another effort, T. S. had been more successful; for after graduation at SNS he had taught for a year before enrolling in law school at Alabama.  A young lady in his seventh grade class, wrote in 1971, 65 years after having him as her English teacher: "We youngsters adored him.  We would stay afternoons and he read to us works of Edgar Allen Poe -- 'The Pit and the Pendulum', 'The Gold Bug' -- especially did he read us tales of horror."

In 1933, most citizens of Florence, Alabama, considered The Store a horror story: more a nightmare they wished could be put aside.  But the Anniston (Alabama) Star kept perspective,  "Like William Faulkner of Mississippi, he has chosen to picture the South wart and all, as Cromwell ordered his artist to do; and although many so-called professional Southerners are of the opinion that the warts have been exaggerated out of proportion, his realistic approach is provocative if not altogether pleasing."

Soon after the announcement of Stribling's Pulitzer Prize, the student editor at the State Normal College in Florence, observed, "We can but wish that he had added a part of that better element which was surely present in Florence at that time."

Those in Florence who remember T. S. Stribling, still wish . . . .

And now.  A PS for TS.  A few in Florence still wish you had not written The Store and you had not received the 1933 Pulitzer Prize . . . .

But, many more in Florence wish THE STORE had not finally closed in 2001 nearly 70 years after you won the PRIZE!

The 2004 book cover shown above is from a Spring/Summer release published by University of Tennessee Press, T. S. Stribling: A Life of the Tennessee Novelist by Kenneth Vickers, PhD.

NEW 2006 Encyclopedia of Appalachia from the University of Tennessee Press has a bio piece on Stribling by Rudy Abramson, retired reporter for Los Angeles Times; former director of PROTECT HISTORIC AMERICA in Prince William County, Virginia; and author of Hallowed Ground, the 1996 history of Disney's America that has several paragraphs on the famous Brent Town tract near Manassas. The historic land tract was owned by Shelby Foote/Foot's ancestors, and Foote/Foot and Stribling are kinsmen. Shelby was key spokesperson for the PROTECT HISTORIC AMERICA campaign that caused Disney to back down on plans to build a history theme park on legacy Foote/Foot land.

Find Birthright, The Store, --
or other Stribling books at your public or university library.