T. S. Stribling: A Life of the Tennessee Novelist.

T. S. Stribling: A Life of the Tennessee Novelist. By Kenneth W. Vickers. (Knoxville: University of Tennesee Press, 2004. Pp. xii, 353. $38.00, ISBN 1-57233-228-X.)

With notable exceptions, white southerner writers who produced social realist works in the era between the world wars are today unread and absent from anthologies. Kenneth W. Vickers's diligent and straightforward biography of T. S. Stribling recalls a once-popular author whose fall into obscurity owed as much to his own shortcomings as to the eclipse of his genre.

Stribling dallied briefly with teaching and the law before finding a livelihood in churning out formulaic morality tales for Sunday school magazines. He graduated to juvenile adventure stories set in South America and Algiers. His first serious novel, published as a serial, was set in southern Tennessee and examined the disillusionment of a young man of mixed race who returned home from the North to promote racial uplift. Mulatto protagonists were the leading black characters in Stribling's works. These mulattos were often naive, uncertain of the identity of their white fathers, and defiant of racist conventions. In The Store, which garnered the 1933 Pulitzer prize for fiction, a prominent northern Alabama merchant fails to halt the lynching of a tenant who had accused him of fraud. The white businessman realizes too late that the victim is his son by the slave he raped during the Civil War.

Stribling's seemingly frank discussion of racial violence, stark descriptions of impoverished rural whites, and skepticism of southern fundamentalism persuaded many readers that he was challenging both the genteel literary tradition and conservative resistance to social reform. Members of the Agrarian movement dismissed Stribling's novels as propaganda tracts that slandered the region, and they insisted that he failed to meet the emerging standards of New Criticism. Robert Penn Warren may have administered last rites to Stribling's reputation in an essay in 1934 entitled "T. S. Stribling: A Paragraph in the History of Critical Realism." African American critics remained ambivalent about a white writer who depicted the brutality of segregation while presenting stock characters conditioned by stereotype.

Despite his liberal reputation, Stribling was a lifelong Republican, disengaged from the political upheavals of the 1930s and later civil rights struggles. He kept his distance from other writers and avoided reviewing tasks. Vickers's fair-minded study depicts a writer who liked nothing so well as writing fiction and whose apprenticeship in the pulp racket earned him a craft while coarsening his prose and inclining him toward melodrama. Stribling took greater interest in plot than the psychology of his characters. Similarly, his biographer scrupulously describes his literary output but does not clarify Stribling's decisions and behavior. Vickers offers T. S. Stribling on his own terms, while effectively making the case that he should not be ignored.

BEN JOHNSON

Southern Arkansas University