Historian Keri Leigh Merritt joins the conversation around An Inconvenient Woman: The Extraordinary Life of Lillian Smith, the Southerner Who Defied Jim Crow America, her biography of Georgia writer and civil rights advocate Lillian Smith. Peter Biello and Orlando Montoya explore Smith’s relationship with Paula Snelling, her work at Laurel Falls Camp, the literary magazine South Today, and books including Strange Fruit and Killers of the Dream.

An Inconvenient Woman: The Extraordinary Life of Lillian Smith, the Southerner Who Defied Jim Crow America

Credit: St. Martin's Press

 

Lillian Smith was once a nationally known writer, yet her name has faded from much of the public conversation. In this episode of Narrative Edge, Peter Biello introduces Orlando Montoya to Smith through Keri Leigh Merritt’s biography, An Inconvenient Woman. Their discussion follows Smith from her religious childhood in Jasper, Fla., through her time teaching music in China and her eventual return to northeast Georgia, where she helped transform Laurel Falls Camp for Girls into a place for unusually candid conversations about race, politics, sexuality, and the world beyond the mountains.

The episode also centers Paula Snelling, Smith’s life partner and collaborator. Merritt describes Snelling as essential to Smith’s intellectual and literary life, from editing and research to the ideas the two women developed together. Smith and Snelling also created the literary magazine first called Pseudopodia, later The North Georgia Review and finally South Today. Through that publication, they amplified Black and white writers and challenged white Southerners to confront segregation and white supremacy.

Smith’s 1944 novel Strange Fruit, centered on an interracial relationship in the South, brought her national fame and controversy. But Peter finds the larger story of Smith’s life just as compelling: a writer confronting the racial order of her time while building a body of fiction and nonfiction that included Killers of the Dream. By the end of the conversation, the biography becomes an invitation to return not only to Smith’s life but to her writing and to reconsider where she belongs in the history of Georgia literature and the civil rights movement.