As a writer and forward-thinking social critic, Lillian Smith
(1897-1966) was an astute chronicler of the twentieth-century
American South and an early proponent of the civil rights movement.
From her home on Old Screamer Mountain overlooking Clayton,
Georgia, Smith wrote and spoke openly against racism, segregation,
and Jim Crow laws long before the civil rights era. Bringing
together short stories, lectures, essays, op-ed pieces, interviews,
and excerpts from her longer fiction and non fiction, A Lillian
Smith Reader offers the first comprehensive collection of her work
and a compelling introduction to one of the South's most important
writers. A conservatory-trained music teacher who left the
profession to assume charge of her family's girls' camp in Rabun
County, Georgia, Smith began her literary career writing for a
journal that she coedited with her lifelong companion, Paula
Snelling, successively titled Pseudopodia (1936), the North Georgia
Review (1937-41), and South Today (1942-45). Known today for her
controversial, best-selling novel, Strange Fruit (1944); her
collection of autobiographical essays, Killers of the Dream (1949);
and her lyrical documentary, Now Is the Time (1955), Smith was
acclaimed and derided in equal measures as a southern white liberal
who critiqued her culture's economic, political, and religious
institutions as dehumanising for all: white and black, male and
female, rich and poor. She was also a frequent and eloquent
contributor to periodicals such as the Saturday Review, LIFE, the
New Republic, the Nation, and the New York Times. The influence of
Smith's oeuvre extends far beyond these publications. Her legacy
rests on her sense of social justice, her articulation of racial
and social inequities, and her challenges to the status quo. In
their totality, her works propose a vision of justice and human
understanding that we have yet to achieve.
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