T. S. Stribling, a short-story writer and novelist whose major period of creativity was during the 1920s and 1930s, is chiefly known for his works of iconoclastic social realism--works which established him as a pioneer of the Southern Literary Renascence. As one of the generating forces in this literary awakening which occurred in the South in the mid-1920s, Stribling, in his novels with Southern settings---works that today are generally recognized as his primary contribution as a novelist--applied the methods of critical realism to a broad and significant subject matter which many earlier Southern novelists either had neglected or treated in a whimsical or sentimental manner. In so doing, he brought to the forefront new themes, situations from Southern social history, and character types that some more prominent Southern social novelists such as Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, and Robert Penn Warren would treat similarly in their...