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Born in
1897 to a wealthy white family in Jasper Florida (a town
near the Georgia border) Lillian Smith was first and
foremost a civil rights activist. As a gifted writer,
she devoted her life to the racial
justice and equality for women.
Smith began her literary career
writing for a journal called Pseudopodia (1936),
The North Georgia Review (1937 - 1941) and South Today
(1942 - 1945).
In 1944 she became well-known, even notorious
for her controversial novel,
Strange Fruit, which chronicles the tragic love
story between a white man and a black woman. The story is
told through blatant language, sexual undertones and
controversial depictions of small southern towns. The novel
was banned in Boston for obscenity. Proving that controversy
is the best marketing strategy for success,
Strange Fruit sold over three million copies and
was translated into fourteen languages.
For the next thirty years
Lillian Smith wrote about the segregation of blacks and the
south’s continual destruction of the black community. She
also continued to write, as she did in
Strange Fruit, about the poisonous effects this
segregation had on whites.
She was a regular contributor to
the Saturday Review, Life,
New Republic,
Nation,
and the
New York Times. In 1968, the Southern
Regional Council's "Lillian Smith Book Awards" was created
to honor artistic and scholarly books that
contribute to a better understanding of human rights and
other social issues.
Lillian
Smith died in 1966 in Atlanta, Georgia.
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For more books by and about Lillian
Smith
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