Word: vaidens
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...that in the long run U. S. readers, though they may be taken in by shoddy, like honest homespun better. Readers who passed by The Forge and The Store will do well to retrace their steps, but Unfinished Cathedral stands foursquare by itself, needs no synopsis-guidebook. Col. Miltiades Vaiden, son of a poor blacksmith. Confederate soldier, unreconstructed rebel, has become in his old age the big man of his Alabama town. Banker and pillar of the church, he has left far behind him his wild youth and the ugly rumors that attended his rise to fortune. He is happy...
...Forge (TIME, March 23, 1931) Author Stribling gave the first spin to a projected three-novel cycle about the South. He told of the fortunes and misfortunes of the Vaiden family during the Civil War. The Store tells particularly of Col. Miltiades Vaiden and his rise to notoriety in Florence, Ala., about the time of Grover Cleveland's presidencies. Written in the great tradition of well-peopled novels, the book successfully commingles impartial observation and ubiquitous sympathy, tinged with a faintly subacid humor. In pitch, scope, execution it is easily the most important U. S. novel of the year...
...begin his climb. A drunken confession on the part of T. Handback, the town's wealthy merchant, gives him his chance. Years ago Handback had cheated Miltiades of his small fortune in cotton ; now, when the Colonel learns that the highly respectable Handback keeps a quadroon mistress, Gracie Vaiden, one of the old Vaiden slaves, he uses the information to pry himself, as a clerk at $7.50 a week, into Handback's store. Straight way he makes friends with the Negroes and poor whites, by selling 16-oz. pounds of goods instead of the customary twelve. Soon...
Trusted entirely by the rascally Handback, Miltiades oversees the collection of his crops. Chance brings him the opportunity to settle old scores ? he ships 500 bales of Handback cotton to New Orleans, puts the proceeds in a valise in Gracie Vaiden's attic. Though Handback's mistress, she is an old Vaiden slave and will never tell. Miltiades goes about his business, calmly awaits the storm. The whole town knows of his peculation, accepts it philosophically : "Hit's nachel ? hit's nachel . . . evahthing what's bad is nachel...
...tenants try to bully him. But by means of his extraordinary pertinacity he wins at least respite. Handback. on discovering how Gracie took part against him. commits suicide. The force behind Miltiades' tragic story has, willy-nilly, affected everybody in Florence ? Landers, the second- sighted postmaster; Toussaint, a Vaiden octoroon; Miltiades' nephew, particularly a young highly Jerry Catlin, attractive character whose undeveloped capabilities leave the book with an aftermath to be harvested, presumably, in the closing novel of Author Stribling's cycle...