Regarded as a classic of its kind and originally published in 1953, the aim of this book was to consider children's books as literature and to discover some of the standards by which they could be judged. Lillian Smith applied the highest critical standards to identify literary qualities without losing sight of the interests of children.

Unreluctant Years

Smith, Lillian

Penguin??Books

Strange Fruit (canceled)

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.

Strange Fruit

Literature & Fiction

Harcourt

United States

Harper Paperbacks

Lillian Smith has here painted an enchanting portrait of Christmas as she knew it in childhood. 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.”

Memory of a Large Christmas (Norton Paperback)

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

W.W.Norton&Company

A Southern white writer, educator, and activist, Lillian Smith (1897–1966) spoke out all her life against injustice. In Killers of the Dream (1949), her most influential book, she draws on memories of her childhood to describe the psychological and moral cost of the powerful, contradictory rules about sin, sex, and segregation―the intricate system of taboos―that undergirded Southern society. 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.

Killers of the Dream

Norton

“This book brings Lillian Smith into focus as an unjustly neglected writer of force and talent and a courageous crusader for the unfettered potential of the human spirit.” ―Publishers Weekly 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.

The Winner Names the Age: A Collection of Writings

Contemporary

W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.

“This book brings Lillian Smith into focus as an unjustly neglected writer of force and talent and a courageous crusader for the unfettered potential of the human spirit.” ―Publishers Weekly 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.

The Winner Names the Age: A Collection of Writings by Lillian Smith

Essays & Correspondence

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

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.

New American Library

Religion & Spirituality

Signet

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Smith, Lillian. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Smith, Lillian

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Smith, Lillian. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Unreluctant Years

Strange Fruit

Strange Fruit (canceled)

Memory of a Large Christmas (Norton Paperback)

Killers of the Dream

The Winner Names the Age: A Collection of Writings

The Winner Names the Age: A Collection of Writings by Lillian Smith

Killers of the Dream

Strange Fruit

Strange Fruit