[The] particular feature of Stribling's work—and the cause of his initial success, or perhaps notoriety—was his treatment of Negro-white relations. Stribling argued in [his fiction] that the South can never realize its human potential until the white man and the black man, dependent as they are on one another, begin to live in harmony.

Stribling is important, then, as an early realist among modern Southern writers and as a propagandist of improved racial relations…. [He] depicted in his works the character of the educated, mixed blood Negro trying to improve his condition. This new fictional concept of the black man created, as Frank Durham has recently pointed out [see excerpt above], a new set of stereotypes, among the worst of which were Stribling's. In Birthright, for example, he tends to accept the old clichés of Negro inferiority, indolence and sexual promiscuity—so much so, in...