The Store (Library of Alabama Classics)

Original 1932 edition in well used condition. Eye opening description of the interaction between whites and blacks recently freed from slavery during the period of the 1880's, called 'The Redemption of the South' after reconstruction Well written and engrossing, but terribly sad. It provides insights about where we are right now in America, given our history of slavery, the horror of Civil War, and the failure of Reconstruction.

You must be able to tolerate the N word to read this book. Things have changed culturally since this was written, and sympathy for the main character is no longer something our culture allows easily. I did not think the plot was worth the length of this book. I certainly did not feel the depth of the story line like I have with other Pulitzer Prize winners.

Wow. This is one of the fanciest books I own. Leather-bound, gold-embossed...I didn't expect this at all.

A must read for history lovers ,who want an honest look at the south during pre-civil war and reconstruction.

I read the Forge two years ago, and really liked it. I had meant to read the Store sooner after that, but for various reasons did not do so until now. The Store takes place about 20 years after the Forge, and I did not quite like it as much. It focuses primarily on one of the characters from the Forge, though it still includes others.Its still a good read, particularly in expressing the dichotomy of black and white viewpoints of situations and behaviors, particularly the failure of white characters to understand the rational behavior of black characters. I like the setting, 1884 Alabama, which I knew absolutely nothing about before reading the book. The change of seasons, political events, range of characters, provide a very immersive read.I have to remove a star because I don't think its particularly good literature. I think the plot is a little contrived, and some of the characters are not well drawn. Someone else mentioned, Ponny, whose character is only in being "fat". She was more well-drawn in the Forge. In particular, the author's belief in the occult, which was a small element in the Forge, is much more prominent in the Store. I do mean the author's belief, as well as some of the characters in the book, the belief that the dead can find ways to talk to people from beyond the grave, can reveal things they might not even have known when alive. This was a popular thing in the 1910s, 20s, 30s when this book was written. I noticed it also in Booth Tarkington's the Magnificent Ambersons, where he kind of screws up the ending with a bizarre occult twist. This same element in The Store devalues the plot which is otherwise pure historical fiction. Two characters in particular are driven by this true occult obsession/connection throughout the book, not just in one little spot as with the Forge.Someone might ask, why did this book get the Pulitzer and not the Forge. The Pulitzers prizes for fiction often miss the mark. Most of the best fiction from this era are not Pulitzer prizes, and most of the Pulitzers are forgotten for good reason. For example, the same year the Store was published, A Light in August (Faulkner) and The Thin Man (Hammett) were published. In addition, Pulitzers were often given to established authors AFTER they had written their best work. For example, they gave a Pulitzer for Arrowsmith after Sinclair Lewis had already won a Nobel Prize for his other books Main Street and Babbitt. (He refused to accept the prize.) They gave one to Hemingway for a book published 30 years after his best fiction was published, and for a terrible book by Willa Cather, 5 years after My Antonia was published. If you are looking for good literature, don't read the Pulitzers. There are many other good lists to go by.However, I would still recommend reading The Forge, and the Store, for the experience of the setting, the events, the viewpoints. I do intend to finish the trilogy and read the Unfinished Cathedral, and I hope that this silly mystical element does not take on an even bigger role.If you have not read the Forge, I think you can still read the Store as a stand alone novel. I had forgotten many of the details of the Forge, and I still found the Store to be readable. However, I think it would be better to read the Forge first, since I think it may be a better book, and because many of the characters are influenced by events of the past which are described in the Forge. The author himself was born in Tennessee. His father's family fought for the North, his mother's Alabama family fought for the South. The Catlins and Vaidens represent those families. So I think The Forge is a great place to start the saga.

At the same time in the 1930’s when William Faulkner was writing his novels of Yoknapatawpha County, there was another author, T.S. Stribling, writing about a town in Alabama. However, whereas Faulkner turned Oxford, Mississippi into Jefferson and Lafayette County into Yoknapatawpha, T.S. Stribling wrote about Florence, the county seat of Lauderdale County in Alabama and kept the real names for a trilogy of novels about the Vaiden family, ‘The Forge’, ‘The Store’, and ‘Unknown Cathedral’. These novels depicted members of this family at different time periods; ‘The Forge’ takes place during the Civil War; ‘The Store’ occurs just before, during, and after the 1884 U.S. election in which Grover Cleveland, the first Democrat since the Civil War, is elected; ‘Unfinished Cathedral’ occurs in the 1920’s after President Herbert Hoover has implemented the Tennessee Valley Authority to supply electricity to much of the area and stimulate a real estate boom.‘The Store’ won the Pulitzer Prize for 1932 but like many Pulitzer winners has become mostly forgotten. At the time it was valued for its fairly realistic depiction of the changes the Civil War wrought upon the South, how the end of slavery did not significantly improve the lives of its black citizens as they were now sharecroppers still in debt to their white employers/former masters but not guaranteed the same protection under the law as the whites.Even whites such as Miltiades Vaiden, formerly a Confederate soldier, Klansman, and slave-owner, has suffered economically by the reign of the carpetbaggers. He feels that the merchant Handback has robbed him, taking twenty-five hundred dollars’ worth of cotton from the Vaiden family on the day he filed for bankruptcy and, thus, never paid them anything for it. Milt has held that grudge now for twenty years. Now Handback offers him a job working in his store. Vaiden takes the job and, contrary to Handback’s instruction, he doesn’t shortchange the black customers or give them less than what they paid for. Miltiades Vaiden is a complex character. He supports the white supremacy of the culture 100% and feels that blacks like Toussaint, the ‘white Negro’ son of his former slave, Gracie, is trying to get above himself by trying to go to college. Milt doesn’t realize until late in the novel that Toussaint is his own son.Milt is somewhat ashamed of his fat wife Ponny, whom he married years earlier, mainly because he had been rejected by his true love, Drusilla Crowninshield, who married his friend and fellow soldier during the Civil War. Ponny is now pregnant, so Milt feels a sense of urgency in trying to recover what he feels was stolen from him. One day he leaves work at Handback’s store, while Handback is out, and has several hundred bales of cotton sent down to the nearest port. He plans to sell the cotton downriver in New Orleans and pocket the profits. While he is gone—AWOL for three days—Handback finds out about Vaiden’s plan and goes to his house where he interrogates Ponny. Ponny knows nothing specific about Milt’s plan and the stress brings on a miscarriage, causing her death.When Milt returns, he finds out about Ponny’s death. He doesn’t seem terribly grief stricken. In fact, the authorial voice that gets into his head treats the whole matter of Ponny, her weight, and her clinging nature very dismissively. Milt is now free to pursue the widow Drusilla, and visits her and her daughter Sydna, who is very worshipful of Milt.There is a large gallery of characters and Stribling gets into each of their heads, white as well as black. His use of dialect in the speech of most of the black characters is a bit thick but he does depict them sympathetically and with a lack of the kind of condescension Margaret Mitchell would display toward her black characters in ‘Gone With the Wind’ just a few years later.Another subject that is brought up and treated superficially is mysticism and spirituality. Vaiden’s nephew Charlie, an impressionable young college student, seems preoccupied with the idea of spirits traveling and communicating with each other. The postmaster Landers, a Northern sympathizer, also seems to be a transcendentalist. I mention this because I have never detected the subject to be treated at all in any of Stribling’s contemporaries in American literature.I won’t go into any great detail about the rest of the plot other than to say nothing goes according to the way you expect it might. Stribling has so many plot threads going simultaneously that he leaves at least a few of them hanging. If he were to resolve all of them the novel would probably be at least 100 pages longer.Stribling’s style is fairly readable and he has the ability to keep the reader invested enough to keep turning the pages. He does use antiquated terms like “minify” and “hobbledehoy” that date the book. To a modern reader, the regular use of the n-word and all its variations will undoubtedly offend; if you choose to read it take this practice with a large chunk of salt. While the selection of the Pulitzer Prize going to this novel in a year in which Faulkner’s ‘Light in August’ was also published seems an injustice, I can see why the judges might have been disposed to prefer this novel. I have read that Faulkner did own a copy of this book and that the Vaiden trilogy may have even influenced his conception of the Snopes trilogy. Taken as a historical artifact, ‘The Store’ is still worth a read.

The Store is the 2nd book in the T.S. Stribling Vaiden series. I've already reviewed the first book, The Forge, and most everything I have to say about this book was summed up in that review. The rating has been raised, as a result of the fact that I'm currently about 1,500 pages into the series and am nowhere near ready for it to be over. That's saying something.One thing that was different in this book was that there was a new fat character, and apparently her entirely personality was that of 'fat'. Seriously, he actually wrote :"I don't know," she called back flabbily, "I might want something to eat."How exactly does a person speak 'flabbily'?