Born 12 December 1897, Jasper, Florida; died 28 September 1966, Atlanta, Georgia
Daughter of Calvin and Anne Simpson Smith
Lilian Smith was the seventh of nine children. She tasted the "strange fruit" of racial segregation early in her childhood, when her well-to-do, genteel Methodist parents took in an apparently white orphan found living with a black family. The Smiths welcomed the girl until they learned she was part black; then the children were hastily separated, leaving Smith in conflict over the paradox of a culture that teaches hospitality, democracy, and Christian charity at the same time it violently denies the humanity of blacks.
Smith's traditional Southern upbringing led her to value literature, art, and music and to want to be socially useful. Her education (at Piedmont College and Baltimore's Peabody Conservatory of Music) was repeatedly interrupted by declining family fortunes, which had forced the Smiths to move to their summer home in Clayton, Georgia, in 1915. Smith joined the Student Nursing Corps in World War I and, after the Armistice, taught for a year in an isolated mountain school in Georgia. She spent three years teaching music at a Methodist mission school in Huchow, China, and then returned to help run Laurel Falls Camp for Girls, the exclusive summer camp her father founded at their Georgia home, and to act as secretary to her brother Austin, the city manager of Fort Pierce, Florida. In 1928 she attended Columbia University's Teachers College, adding to her already considerable knowledge of child development and Freudian psychology. After her father died in 1930, Smith assumed heavy family responsibilities including the care of her invalid mother. And, in the next five years, she wrote five novels, never published and all lost in a 1944 house fire.
Along with her lifelong companion, Paula Snelling, another young liberal Southern intellectual hired to help run the camp, Smith founded Pseudopodia, a little magazine heavily influenced by the editors' Freudian persuasion and their antisegregationist political and social views. At first the magazine concentrated on reviewing works by and about blacks and took a literary stand against, among other things, Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind and the Agrarians. It was renamed twice—as the North American Review (1937-42) and South Today (1942-44)—as the editors broadened their liberal crusade against the consequences of caste in the South and in other countries and as it became a forum also for Smith's fervent views on sexuality and childrearing.
Strange Fruit (1944, reprinted most recently in 1992), Smith's first published novel, sold over 3,000,000 copies and was translated into 16 languages. It was banned from the bookstores and libraries of Boston and from the bookstores of Detroit; Eleanor Roosevelt intervened to remove the Post Office ban. Much of the uproar stemmed from the realistic language and the ironic treatment of miscegenation, sexuality, and abortion. Set in racially segregated Maxwell, Georgia, in the years following World War I, the plot traces from its youthful beginning the secret interracial love affair of Tracy Deen—a war veteran, son of the town's respected white doctor and his aristocratic wife—and Nonnie Anderson—a black college graduate who can only find a job as a maid in Maxwell.
As in Theodore Dreiser's American Tragedy and Richard Wright's Native Son, Smith's fictional world is deterministic. Characters breaking a taboo in this segregated society must suffer violence. Tracy Deen is murdered by the brother of his pregnant lover. A mob lynches the black servant Deen had paid to marry Nonnie so he could marry as his mother and the town expect him to. Smith handles the stream-of-consciousness technique well, aptly combining it with the sensational plot and subject matter to create a strongly moving, finely detailed picture of the tragedy of racism for both black and white Southerners.
The furor over Strange Fruit created the national publishing and speaking outlet Smith needed to wage her campaign against racism. She published a second novel, One Hour (1959, 1994), and five nonfiction books that preach racial justice and denounce any person or organization that did not seem as liberal as she. Each book contains eloquent stories about her personal life and the lives of those she encountered on her travels through the South and abroad. Her ability to recreate atmosphere through physical detail allows her to carry out the psychological, social, and political analysis that is her purpose.
Smith also wrote a column for the Chicago Defender and articles and book reviews for such widely read magazines as New Republic, Saturday Review, Redbook, the Nation, and McCall's.
Smith's contribution to the cause of racial justice in the U.S. won her the reputation as the most liberal white advocate of civil rights in the South in the 1940s. In the 1950s and 1960s, despite recurrent battles with lung cancer, Smith continued to fight against the evils of segregation by championing the nonviolent movement of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Her conviction was deep and sincere, but her view of literature and art was limited by the intensity of her belief in the perfectability of mankind. She took daring stands against segregation, but the impact of her writing is diminished by her moralizing. Smith is justifiably recognized as a minor literary figure and a major social reformer.
Other Works:
Killers of the Dream (1949, 1994). The Journey (1954, 1964). Now Is the Time (1955). Memory of a Large Christmas (1962, 1996). Our Faces, Our Words (1964). From the Mountain (writings from South Today, edited by H. White and R. S. Suggs, Jr., 1972). The Winner Names the Age (edited by M. Cliff, 1978, 1982). How Am I to Be Heard? Letters of Lillian Smith (1993). Lillian E. Smith Papers: 1920-1980 (archives of the Library of Congress, 1980). Now Is the Time (1955).
Bibliography:
Blackwell, L., and F. Clay, Lillian Smith (1971). Brewer, P. B., Lillian Smith: Thorn in the Flesh of Crackerdom (dissertation, 1983). Camacho, R. V., Woman Born of the South: Race, Region and Gender in the Work of Lillian Smith (dissertation, 1992). Hill, S. W., "The South Today: A Critical Study ofLillian Smith's Little Magazine" (thesis, 1991). Jenkins, M., The South in Black and White: Race, Sex, and Literature in the 1940s (1999). Loveland, A. C., Lillian Smith, a Southerner Confronting the South: A Biography (1986). Miller, K. A. Out of the Chrysalis: Lillian Smith and the Transformation of the South (dissertation, 1986). Morehouse, L. "Bio-Bibliography of Miss Lillian Smith" (thesis, 1956). O'Dell, M. D., "Sites of Southern Memory: The Autobiographies of Katharine DuPre Lumpkin, Lillian Smith, and Pauli Murray" (dissertation, 1997). Sosna, M., In Search of the Silent South: Southern Liberals and the Race Issue (1977). Sullivan, M., A Bibliography of Lillian Smith & Paula Snelling (1971).
Reference works:
CB (1944). Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States (1995).
Other references:
Great Women Writers Read Their Work (audiocassette, 1974, 1986).
—SUZANNE ALLEN
American Women Writers: A Critical Reference Guide from Colonial Times to the Present
