Mr. Stribling's Unfinished Cathedral, the third novel in his trilogy of the social history of the South, has now been published. An examination of this trilogy along with his other novels reveals that his is one of the sanest pictures of the South to be presented by a Southern novelist. He paints sympathetically the South of Civil War and Reconstruction days; yet he avoids the gushing sentimentality which is the bane of most of our novelists dealing with this period. He presents us with the hillman and in so doing avoids both the romanticized "natural" man and the equally exaggerated perverts and bastards as portrayed by William Faulkner. (p. 341)

[In Bright Metal and Teeftallow] Stribling depicts with an objectivity unusual in our Southern novelists the hillman's animosity toward the outside world, his distrust of the law, his cruel violence when aroused and, pervading all, his Calvinistic religion.

Innate...