| Tennessee novelist T. S. Stribling was a pioneer figure in the Southern Literary Renaissance of the early twentieth century. During the 1920s and 1930s, in the groundbreaking novels Birthright, Teeftallow, Bright Metal, The Forge, The Store, and Unfinished Cathedral, he pointed out the harsh reality of white suppression of blacks, the adverse conditions of sharecropping, the destructive influence of rampant materialism, and the stagnation of provincial close-mindedness and poor white mentality. His works demonstrated the rich material available to southern writers and helped to create modern southern literature. His books also serve as insightful social histories of the hills of south central Tennessee and northwest Alabama. The Store won the Pulitzer Prize in 1933.;In addition to his influential southern novels, Stribling wrote in a wide variety of genres over a career that spanned roughly sixty years. He produced Sunday school moral stories, innovative science fiction and mysteries for the "pulp" magazine market, as well as mainstream short fiction for "slick" magazines like the Saturday Evening Post. He wrote romantic adventure novels with such exotic settings as Venezuela and Algiers, and satirical novels about American politics and university life. In 1928, Rope, a dramatization of Teeftallow opened on Broadway and enjoyed a short run.;Stribling was born in Clifton, Tennessee, on 4 March 1881. He was educated in local schools before earning a teaching degree from Florence Normal School, and he was eventually graduated from the University of Alabama School of law. Despite this education, he always pursued a career as a writer. He lived in Clifton; New York City; Fort Myers, Marianna, and Miami Beach, Florida; and he traveled in Europe, the Caribbean, and Venezuela. In 1931, he married Luella Kloss. T. S. Stribling died 8 July 1965 in Florence, Alabama. |
