The Forge
The first book in T. S. Stribling's award-winning Vaiden Trilogy about life in north Alabama at the onset, during, and after the Civil War
Originally published in 1931, The Forge introduces the Vaiden family, residents of the rural north Alabama of Stribling’s own youth. The Vaidens are a family of white yeoman farmers who scratch out a living in the social and financial shadow of the Lacefields, masters of an opulent plantation nearby.
The novel opens on Alabama’s secession and the onset of the Civil War. It traces the story of Miltiades Vaiden, who enlists in the Confederate army, and explores the ways the Vaidens, Lacefields, and freed slaves attempt to adapt to the collapse of southern society on the home front.
After The Forge, Stribling continued the Vaiden saga in 1932 with The Store, which earned him the Pulitzer Prize. He completed the trilogy in 1934 with The Unfinished Cathedral. Together, the three books paint a portrait of the agrarian South of the mid-nineteenth century, its destruction, and the beginnings of a mercantile future.
A half-century ago, Stribling won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. What Stribling did in his day was somewhat revolutionary; years before Faulkner, Stribling was publishing short stories set in the South that completely challenged the old molasses-and-roses plots of Southern literature.... The raw material Stribling used was close at hand and rubbed many raw nerves in the tense days of the 1920s and 1930s. But the message itself is just as relevant now as then.’
—Larry McGehee, author of Southern Seen: Meditations on Past and Present
T.S. Stribling was born in 1881 in Clifton, Tennessee, the child of a family whose allegiance was divided in the Civil War. In 1902, he graduated from Florence Normal School, now the University of North Alabama. In 1903, he relocated to Tuscaloosa where he taught high school and attended the University of Alabama School of Law. He practiced law until 1907, when he devoted himself to writing full-time. His “Vaiden Trilogy” is considered his magnum opus, and the second book in the series, The Store, earned the Pulitzer Prize. By the time of his death, he had written more than twelve novels, one a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, two Literary Guild selections, and another the first book by an American selected by the English Book League.
