T. S. Stribling
Thomas Sigismund Stribling, often referred to as T. S. Stribling, was an American author born on March 4, 1881, in Clifton, Tennessee. His upbringing was marked by the contrasting legacies of the Civil War, as his father fought for the Union and his mother’s family supported the Confederacy, instilling in him a keen awareness of the South's historical and cultural complexities. Stribling pursued a diverse educational path, initially training as a teacher and then graduating from law school, but his passion for writing led him to a career in fiction.
He became known for his short adventure stories and later published novels that addressed social and political issues, particularly racial prejudice in the South, exemplified in his notable work *Birthright*. His literary contributions include a trilogy—*The Forge*, *The Store*, and *Unfinished Cathedral*—which offered a critical look at Southern life and earned him a Pulitzer Prize for *The Store*. In the later years of his career, Stribling shifted towards mystery and detective fiction. He returned to his hometown of Clifton, where he passed away on July 10, 1965. While his portrayal of the South has faced criticism, Stribling's work remains significant for its exploration of complex themes within Southern society.
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T. S. Stribling
- Born: March 4, 1881
- Birthplace: Clifton, Tennessee
- Died: July 10, 1965
- Place of death: Clifton, Tennessee
Biography
Thomas Sigismund Stribling was born on March 4, 1881, in Clifton, Tennessee. His father had fought for the Union in the American Civil War, and his mother’s family had fought for the Confederacy, thus from an early age he was sensitive to historical and cultural forces that had shaped the contemporary American South. Stribling attended Clifton Masonic Academy, and in 1898 he entered high school at Southern Normal College in Huntingdon.
In 1902 he took an editorial job at the Clifton News, which he hoped to parlay into a writing career, but at his parents’ request, he enrolled in college in Florence, Alabama. There he completed his certification for teacher training. He taught high school in Tuscaloosa until 1904, when he enrolled at the School of Law at the University of Alabama. He graduated with his law degree in 1905 and worked with a firm until 1907, when he took an entry-level job at the Taylor- Trotwood Magazine, which would publish his earliest short fiction. The job lasted less than a year, but in that time Stribling mastered the skill of writing short fiction. He became a prolific writer of short adventure stories with a moral cast; he sold these stories in quantity to popular fiction magazines for boys and young men for most of the next decade.
During these years, Stribling traveled extensively in Cuba, South America, and Europe. He returned to Tennessee in 1917 to work on the Chattanooga News. That same year saw the publication of his first novel, The Cruise of the Dry Dock, a wartime adventure whose setting and characters were informed by his foreign travels. This was the first of several popular exotic adventure tales Stribling would turn out in the next few years, including three set in Venezuela: Fombombo (1923), Red Sand (1924), and Strange Moon (1929). Stribling’s second novel, Birthright, appeared in 1922. The story of an educated southern black who returns to his Tennessee hometown in the hope of bringing about reforms but who is thwarted by racial prejudice, the novel was praised critically and set the stage for more novels in which Stribling crusaded against social and political ills of the modern American South. Teeftallow (1926) and Bright Metal (1928) both explore the ingrained bigotry and narrow-mindedness of rural Tennessee hill communities, while East is East (1928) depicts a southerner traveling in modern Algiers as the archetypal ugly American.
Stribling married Lou Ella Kloss, a violinist from Clifton, in 1931. That same year, he published The Forge, the first book in a trilogy that would include The Store (1932) and Unfinished Cathedral (1934). The trilogy would provide a caustic chronicle of the contemporary southern American experience from the antebellum days to the present. The series was immensely popular, and the The Store won Stribling a Pulitzer Prize.
In 1935, Stribling took the job of instructor in novel writing at the Extension Division of Columbia University in New York. He translated his experiences into his last novel, These Bars of Flesh, a satire of modern academia published in 1938. For the rest of his life, Stribling concentrated on writing mystery and detective stories, some featuring Henry Poggioli, an amateur sleuth with a degree in psychology and a talent for unraveling outlandish enigmas whose adventures Stribling had first collected in Clues of the Caribbees (1929).
Stribling returned to Clifton, Tennessee, in 1965 and died there on July 10, 1965, after a brief illness. In his lifetime and afterward, he was criticized by many contemporaries for his unsympathetic portrait of the South as backward and hostage to provincial thinking. Although his renown as a writer of realistic novels has declined, his detective tales have earned him enduring celebrity.