Strange Fruit [Hardcover]

Lillian Smith (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1944

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.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

It's August, it's hot, it's revival time in Maxwell, Georgia. Tracy Deen, the rebel child who always disappoints his self-sacrificing mother, returns home from World War I. It is clear as day, once he is able to put his feelings into words, that he loves Nonnie Anderson. But Tracy Deen is white and Nonnie Anderson isn't. She's from one of the best colored families in Maxwell, even college educated, but she isn't white; and now she's pregnant with Tracy's child and she's glad. Nonnie's brother and sister try to make Nonnie see the problems they all now face. Maxwell is a town where, on the surface, people know their place. But after a white man is murdered in the black part of town, fear takes over and a vigilante group soon appears. A young man laments: "Right now, I have some ideas...If I stay here twenty years, I won't have them. Now I see things without color getting in the way - I won't be able to, then. It'll get me. It gets us all. Like quicksand. The more you struggle, the deeper you sink in it - I'm damned scared to stay -." Strange Fruit, written fifty years ago, confronts problems that have yet to be resolved, that need to be read about and acted upon. -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14. -- From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Holly Smith --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

About the Author

Lillian Smith (1897 - 1966) was a novelist, essayist, and one of the first prominent white southerners to denounce racial segregation openly and to work actively against the entrenched and often brutally enforced world of Jim Crow. Author of Killers of the Dream, The Journey, and One Hour and recipient of the Southern Authors Award in 1950, she was both celebrated and condemned for Strange Fruit, her first, and most accomplished, novel.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Harcourt; 15th Printing edition (January 1944)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151857695
• ISBN-13: 978-0151857692
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,139,600 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Incredible! A definite winner!, August 17, 2001

By 

Paz - See all my reviews

This review is from: Strange Fruit (Paperback)

I don't think I've ever read a book as complete in so many different ways as this one. It had a lot of intelligent insight about people and society, it made my cry, it made me laugh, it made me swoon at the love story, the language was beautiful, and half way through the story, the suspense got really exciting. I can't think what more I could ever ask for in a book. This book is about race relations in the early 20th century South, but it's also about so much more than that. It's about the need we all have to find our place in this world and to be accepted and loved. This book is for anyone who's ever felt like an outcast in society. It's also for anyone who's ever really loved anyone, whether it was a family member or a romantic love, and whether they received love back in return or not.

17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Moving portrayal of interracial love in 1920's South, April 8, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Strange Fruit (Paperback)

Strange Fruit is an excellent portrayal of race relations inthe deep South of the 1920's. It is a deeply moving story of forbiddenlove, and the inability of both whites and blacks in the early South to shed the long standing racial bigotry and prejudice, so prevalent in that era.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hard Times in the Deep South, April 6, 2010

By 

David Zimmerman (Baton Rouge, LA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Strange Fruit (Hardcover)

Lilian Smith took on the Jim Crow racial system of the American Deep South and the hypocrisy of white southern Christians head on in her seminal 1950 memoir Killers of the Dream, making the subject of her 1944 novel "Strange Fruit" in a sense no surprise to current day readers. In 1944, a different reaction met the book as it was widely criticized and even banned and confiscated - the book's blurb says for profanity (that I didn't even notice) and its incendiary depiction of a small Georgia town during a life and death crisis. Its power undiluted, "Strange Fruit" still became the best-selling novel in America in 1944.

Again, religion plays a big role in Smith's book - this time a weeklong series of revival meetings during the early 1920s serves as the backdrop for the story. In front is a years-before-it-became-acceptable romance between Tracy, son of the town's white physician, and Nonnie, the youngest daughter in the town's leading black family. Born of a chilvarous act during the girl's childhood, and surviving absences from the town by both lovers - she to go to college and he to serve in World War I, the love affair goes along very quietly behind the scenes until Nonnie reveals to Tracy that she is pregnant with his child and happy to be so.

As with most dramatic star-crossed romances, this one spirals toward a tragedy that the people in both White Town and Colored Town of Maxwell, Georgia struggle to deal with. Along with depicting the tender interracial love affair, Smith deftly handles a myriad of relationships - parent/child, husband/wife, sister/brother, doctor/patient, business/labor, master/servant, and preacher/parishioner both within and across the racial divide, when such interaction is allowed. Again the hyprocrisy of religion in the form the revival and events in the town is palpable, and even reaches the consciousness of the preacher, who, after the central tragedy, guesses that adult attendance will be down, and therefore schedules an extended youth worship. On a side note, the dialect of the "kuntry" blacks becomes a bit thick at time, but can be understood with careful reading.

White Southerners rationalized the system based on their prejudices about black people, fears about the consequences of a equalized social system, and the strange notion that blacks were somehow better off under white domination than in lives where they could enjoy all the fruits of life. Blacks were faced with a Hobson's choice - relative physical comfort gained by submission vs. likely punishment or worse for resistance.

Reading "Strange Fruit" makes even more clear the necessity of leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the mass civil rights movement. Without it, individuals who chose to live a color-blind life, those who reacted to such "transgressions", and even innocent black bystanders, who ostensibly bought into the system and played by its rules, lived very perilous lives.

Five stars and a very strong recommendation to all readers, except young children who will be stymied by the dialect, for an especially powerful novel, given that it was written by a white woman in the 1940s, when Jim Crow's rule was still strong in the American Deep South.