Lillian Eugenia Smith

How Am I to Be Heard?: Letters of Lillian Smith offers the first full portrait of the life and work of the foremost southern white liberal of the mid-twentieth century. Writer Lillian Smith (1897-1966) devoted her life to lifting the veil of southern self-deception about race, class, gender, and sexuality. Her books, essays, and especially her letters boldly 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. Smith's best-known books are Strange Fruit (1944), a bestselling interracial love story that brought her international acclaim; and Killer 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.^ An avid letter-writer, Smith mastered the epistolary form in her work as director of her family's Laurel Falls Camp, an innovative summer camp for girls in the north Georgia mountains. There she developed her critique of southern attitudes about race and gender, her concern for children, and her theories of social change. Over the years her correspondents included Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, Jr., Richard Wright, and the leaders of such organizations as the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, the NAACP, and CORE. Margaret Rose Gladney has selected 145 of Smith's 1500 extant letters for this volume.^ Arranged chronologically and annotated, the letters provide a rich context for reading Smith's published work and reveal valuable personal and professional information: her courageous fight against racial segregation; her fears about remaining in Georgia, where her property was the target of arson several times; her depression at having been silenced as a writer; her thirteen-year battle against cancer; and the full burden of her struggle as a woman living and writing in the Deep South in the five decades between the two feminist movements of the twentieth century. Gladney's editorial commentary brings into central focus Smith's enduring lesbian relationship with Paula Snelling and creates a portrait of Lillian Smith which recognizes and challenges the attitudes toward gender and sexuality that shaped and defined her life, her choices of self definition, and her critical reception as a writer.^ Gladney argues that Smith's triple isolation - political, sexual, and artistic - from mainstream southern culture permitted her to see and to expose southern prejudices with unique clarity.

The author of "Strange fruit" reflects on the Christmases of her childhood.

Southern novelist and activist Lillian Smith (1897-1966) considered One Hour her best work of fiction. The novel, originally published in 1959 and long out of print, brilliantly depicts the destructive effects of mass hysteria on the people of a small southern town. The protagonist is an Episcopal minister who chronicles a series of tragic events set in motion when his closest friend, a gifted scientist, is unjustly accused of molesting a young girl. The novel's tensions culminate in an eruption of violence and hate that destroys the community. In a new introduction, Rose Gladney places One Hour in its historical context and highlights its enduring meaning for today's readers.

At the end of May 1381, the fourteen-year-old King of England had reason to be fearful: the plague had returned, the royal coffers were empty and a draconian Poll Tax was being widely evaded. Yet Richard, bolstered by his powerful, admired mother, felt secure in his God-given right to reign. Within two weeks, the unthinkable happened: a vast force of common people invaded London, led by a former soldier, Walter Tyler, and the radical preacher John Ball, demanding freedom, equality and the complete uprooting of the Church and State. They believed they were rescuing the King from his corrupt ministers, and that England had to be saved. And for three intense, violent days, it looked as if they would sweep all before them. In this gripping novel, Melvyn Bragg brings an extraordinary episode in English history to fresh, urgent life on both a grand and intimate scale, vividly portraying its central figures. It is an archetypal tale of an epic struggle between the powerful and the apparently powerless.

In this autobiographical work, the author draws on memories of her childhood to describe the psychological costs of the contradictory rules in Southern Society about sin, sex and segregation. She cites the evils of segregation for both white and colored people and gives the history of race relations from pre-Civil War days.

"In its title, Strange Fruit refers to the song of a lynching made famous by Billie Holiday and to the malign persecution that drove Kamau Brathwaite from his New York home to resettlement in his native Barbados. But the title also points to the enigma of beauty created out of that experience of cultural lynching, in poems of urgency, elegance, wisdom and brave humour. ... It is a collection full of beauties of form, phrase and sound, such as in the poem “Sleep Widow” where instead of finding comfort, the poet and loved woman “bull-fight like lock-horm logga-head until the evening pools the grief along our edges/ and cools us to this peace”, the very sounds in the poem fighting their way towards resolution."--Back cover.