T.S. Stribling books

Anthologies

Henry Poggioli Reading Order

Non-Fiction

Short Stories/Novellas

Standalone Novels

The Vaiden Trilogy Reading Order

T.S. Stribling was a Tennessee-born writer whose career spanned from the late 1910s to the 1950s. He is best remembered for the Vaiden Trilogy, three novels tracing a Southern family from the Civil War through Reconstruction and into the early twentieth century. The second novel, The Store, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1933 and remains his most widely read book.

Beyond the Vaiden books, Stribling wrote adventure novels set in the Caribbean and South America, standalone literary fiction about life in the rural South, and a series of detective stories featuring the psychology professor Henry Poggioli. The Poggioli stories, collected in Clues of the Caribbees and later volumes, are clever puzzle mysteries that earned Stribling a following among detective fiction fans separate from his literary reputation.

Stribling’s work fell out of the mainstream after his death, partly overshadowed by other Southern writers of his generation like William Faulkner. But his novels about race, class, and economic change in the South remain historically interesting, and the Poggioli detective stories have kept a small but loyal readership alive.