The Forge (Library of Alabama Classics)

About this book

The first book in T. S. Striblings 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 Striblings 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 Alabamas 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.