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Overview
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 decEditorials
Publishers Weekly -
This collection of 145 letters by author and social activist Smith (1897-1966) are accompanied by informative biographical essays written by Gladney, an assistant professor of American studies at the University of Alabama. The letters reveal the strength of a single voice reflecting on a singular life. As a white woman who was outspokenly opposed to the racism that permeated the American South, where she had been raised, Smith addressed the issue prominently in her literary magazine, South Today , co-edited with her lover, Paula Snelling. After publishing Strange Fruit , a controversial novel about an interracial love affair, Smith lectured widely. Letters to Martin Luther King Jr., to Eleanor Roosevelt and to other activists testify to her involvement in the civil rights movement. Other correspondence here documents Smith's concern with the interaction between sexual and racial attitudes and the impact on children, the subject of her autobiographical work, Killers of the Dream. Illustrated . (Sept.)Book Details
Published
September 1, 1993
Publisher
Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, c1993.
Pages
406
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780807820957