Which novel by Thomas Sigismund Stribling won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1933? The answer is The Store.
Published in 1932, The Store is the second novel in Stribling’s Vaiden trilogy. It follows Miltiades “Milt” Vaiden, a former plantation overseer and Confederate veteran trying to build economic power in Florence, Alabama, during the post-Reconstruction era.
The novel examines the South’s transition from plantation slavery to a society based on free labor, commerce, and racial control. Milt’s rise as a merchant and banker is intertwined with exploitation, opportunism, and his involvement with the Ku Klux Klan. Stribling presents the changing position of formerly enslaved people, many of whom were pushed into sharecropping and tenant farming.
The Store won the 1933 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel, the category’s official name before 1948. The trilogy begins with The Forge, which covers the Civil War and emancipation, and ends with The Unfinished Cathedral, set in the 1920s. Those neighboring titles are common sources of mix-ups.