Strange Fruit

When it was first published in 1944, this novel sparked immediate controversy and became a huge bestseller. It captured with devastating accuracy the deep-seated racial conflicts of a tightly knit southern town. The book is as engrossing and incendiary now as the day it was written.

Lillian Smith (1897 - 1966) was a novelist, essayist, and one of the first prominent white southerners to denounce racial segregation openly and to work actively against the entrenched and often brutally enforced world of Jim Crow. Author of Killers of the Dream, The Journey, and One Hour and recipient of the Southern Authors Award in 1950, she was both celebrated and condemned for Strange Fruit, her first, and most accomplished, novel.