Guide to the Lillian E. Smith Collection

There were nine of the Smith children, and the grandmothers and cousins, and there was a big house that never quite ended, and there were the smokehouse and hog-killing and the shaking of the pecan trees, and all the delicious doings that went on in a nineteenth-century kitchen, which lingered into the early decades of the twentieth century. But above all, there was a father who, as impresario and ritual maker, polished family events so that, as the author says," Even today, a half century later, they blind the eyes with their shine." She goes on to day, "But perhaps what holds it so fresh in my memory is the fact that along with all our physical play and work we lived a wild life of imagination: it was hard to keep it from spilling over into reality and painful when reality would step up and prune our flowering. That is why in this memory of Christmas in a small southern town there are sudden excursions to Versailles and the Hall of Mirrors and to the small-town Opera House and the jail in search of a Christmas gift for the parents; and it is why an elegant coffin could figure so prominently in the festivities. And why, one year, forty-eight 'real' convicts ate Christmas dinner with us." - Amazon

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. - Amazon

Published to wide controversy, it became the source (acknowledged or unacknowledged) of much of our thinking about race relations and was for many a catalyst for the civil rights movement. It remains the most courageous, insightful, and eloquent critique of the pre-1960s South. "I began to see racism and its rituals of segregation as a symptom of a grave illness," Smith wrote. "When people think more of their skin color than of their souls, something has happened to them." Today, readers are rediscovering in Smith's writings a forceful analysis of the dynamics of racism, as well as her prophetic understanding of the connections between racial and sexual oppression. - Goodreads

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.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. - Amazon

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. - Goodreads

This volume collects Lillian Smith's speeches and essays, under three headings. In "Addressed to the South," they are a historical record of segregation and the opposition to segregation. In "Words That Chain Us and Words That Set Us Free," they discuss the power of language to change political and social situations, the necessity of respect for people's differences, the groping for meaning that we do, and the political role of the creative person. The speeches and essays in "Of Women, Men, and Autobiography" deal with such topics as the difference in experience of women and men, the power and powerlessness of women, and the complexities of autobiographical truth. - Amazon

Smith’s last book, Our Faces, Our Words (1964), was a pictorial work about southerners amidst the civil rights movement. - GeorgiaInfo Online Georgia Almanac

This impassioned plea for tolerance, desegregation, and civil rights advocacy was written by one of the South's leading activists and writers. Originally it was published in 1955, a year after the Supreme Court's landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing segregation. Reprinted on the fiftieth anniversary of this case, Now Is the Time addresses issues that continue to resonate in today's world. Lillian Smith's writing is at the same time lyrical and deeply infused with polemics. In Now Is the Time Smith combines the genres of personal essay, confession, propaganda, and documentary to create a moving defense of the inclusive democratic vision she sees as America's true legacy. While broad and visionary in its themes, her book is practical in its approach and its solutions. With wit, intensity, and moral certitude, she answers twenty-five basic questions about race relations, including "Is not education better than legislation?" and "If God wanted the races to mix, why didn't He make us all the same color?" Her commingling of disparate genres makes Now Is the Time more than simply a tract but a document of a nation under the force of tumultuous change. - Goodreads

But you forget this. You start out feeling free. Your bags and your brain are packed full of supplies and facts for your trip, all the things you think you need. And then you get on your Ship or plane or whatever, set for places you have not seen, friends you have not met - and suddenly something is there beside you, whispering, Better not look at that, better not listen; come, I know a place a, person. What a talent these companions have for luring us into dead ends And yet, I could not have done without them. For though there were a few memories, an old worn-out belief or two that almost stopped me before my trip had begun, there were others that opened doors wide. And it was by their help that I found, at last, what I had gone in search of. I went on this journey to find an image of the human being that I could feel proud of. I wanted to reassure myself of mortal strength, of man's power not only to survive on this earth but to continue growing in stature. I wanted the faith to believe that we can fulfill our role in this evolving universe of which we have been given such awesome glimpses. We human beings. What haunting words A tune one knows and can never quite begin and never quite finish. Did they hold a real meaning for me? I was not sure. - Excerpt from The Journey

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. - University of Georgia Press