Rare Books
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.
