The Store (Library Alabama Classics)

The Store (Library Alabama Classics)

<div>The Pulitzer prize-winning <i>The Store</i> is the second novel of Stribling’ s monumental trilogy set in the author’ s native Tennessee Valley region of north Alabama. The action begins in 1884, the year in which Grover Cleveland became the first Democratic president since the end of the Civil War; and it centers about the emergence of a figure of wealth in the city of Florence.<br /><br /><br /><br />In <i>The Store</i>, Stribling succeeds in presenting the essence of an age through the everyday lives of his characters. In the <i>New Yorker</i>, reviewer Robert M. Coates compared Stribling with Mark Twain in his ability to convey the “ very life and movement” of a small Southern town: “ Groups move chatting under the trees or stand loitering in the courthouse square, townsfolk gather at political ‘ speakings’ and drift homeward separately afterward; always, in their doings, one has the sense of a whole community surrounding them, binding them together.” Gerald Bullet wrote in <i>The New Statesman and Nation</i> that the novel “ is a first-rate book… filled with diverse and vital characters; and much of it cannot be read without that primitive excitement, that eagerness to know what comes next, which is, after all, the triumph of the good story teller.”<br /><br /><br /></div><br /><br />