How Am I to Be Heard?

Letters of Lillian Smith

Lillian Smith, Margaret Rose Gladney

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780807845806
  9780807820957
• eBook ISBN:
  9781469620343
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

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. Her books, essays, and especially her letters 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. Her best-known books are Strange Fruit (1944), a bestselling interracial love story that brought her international acclaim; and Killers 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. 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.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Chapter One: Becoming a Writer
• Chapter Two: Making a Space, 1917–1942
• Chapter Three: Dropping Bombs on Georgia’s Peace, 1943–1946
• Chapter Four: Confronting Limitations, 1947–1954
• Chapter Five: Struggling to Be Heard, 1955–1959
• Chapter Six: Mothering the Movement, 1960–1963
• Chapter Seven: Reweaving the Web, 1964–1966
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• A section of illustrations follows page 150