WHEN it was announced that the Pulitzer Prize of $1000 for ‘the best novel published during the year by an American author’ had been awarded to T. S. Stribling for his 560-page narrative The Store (Doubleday, Doran, $2.50), there was a prompt run on the bookstores. Six thousand copies were sold in the three weeks following the award. In the richness of its detail, in the movement which gives vitality to its pages, in the true delight of its Negro dialect, and in the gentle irony which pervades its Southern portraits, it makes real and uncommon claims for distinction. The story’s dependence upon circumstance, however, the use of so many characters who never succeed in being any more than types, and what Mr. Soskin calls its ‘unresolved mysticism,’ are, I believe, flaws. Its honesty and scope tip the scales in its favor; its selection is a pleasing salute to the emerging school of Southern novelists.
