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.

This compelling volume offers the first full portrait of the life and work of writer Lillian Smith (1897-1966), the foremost southern white liberal of the mid-twentieth century. Smith devoted her life to lifting the veil of southern self-deception about race, class, gender, and sexuality. Her books, essays, and especially her letters explored the ways in which the South's attitudes and institutions perpetuated a dehumanizing experience for all its people--white and black, male and female, rich and poor. Her best-known books are "Strange Fruit" (1944), a bestselling interracial love story that brought her international acclaim; and "Killers of the Dream" (1949), an autobiographical critique of southern race relations that angered many southerners, including powerful moderates. Subsequently, Smith was effectively silenced as a writer.

Rose Gladney has selected 145 of Smith's 1500 extant letters for this volume. Arranged chronologically and annotated, they present a complete picture of Smith as a committed artist and reveal the burden of her struggles as a woman, including her lesbian relationship with Paula Snelling. Gladney argues that this triple isolation--as woman, lesbian, and artist--from mainstream southern culture permitted Smith to see and to expose southern prejudices with absolute clarity.