The Store (novel)

Continuing the exploration of the transformation of the American South from its traditional agrarian society to a new economic and social order, The Store follows the return from war of Miltiades "Milt" Vaiden.

Struggling to gain a place after the war, he became head of the newly founded local Ku Klux Klan (KKK), made up of veterans determined to defend white supremacy.

A character described by critic J. Donald Adams in the New York Times as "forceful" and "unscrupulous", Col. Milt Vaiden slowly works his way into business leadership in the town of Florence by the late 1880s, in the post-Reconstruction era.

[5] Stribling explores the personal and economic trials and tribulations of Col. Milt and others during the post-Reconstruction era, when the labor force of freedmen has been converted mostly to sharecroppers and tenant farmers.

The Pulitzer committee said it had selected it because "of its sustained interest, and because of the convincing and comprehensive picture it presents of life in an inland Southern community during the middle eighties of the last century.