[Unfinished Cathedral brings the] unhappy citizens of Florence, Alabama, to the boom days following the Great War. With the death of Colonel Miltiades Vaiden, the former overseer who rose by theft to the most eminent place in the town, the old order vanishes, no new order takes its place, and a prospect of unrelieved chaos opens up at the end of the story.

If Mr. Stribling is to be taken seriously as a novelist, the Southern trilogy is his sole claim to critical attention. Without exception the previous books, which have brought their author that sort of notoriety which is easily mistaken for fame, are inferior exercises in sensational journalism….

[Mr. Stribling] is a writer of sensational melodrama. He takes certain external features of Southern life and uses them as the background of a clumsy, unmotivated plot. There are two aspects of this lack of motivation. The first...