
Strange Fruit (1944) by Lillian Smith
Best sellers of yesteryear often don’t wear well, so I have only recently read Lillian Smith’s Strange Fruit, in spite of having a sense of its political importance and iconic place in the canon of southern literature (and despite having once received a prize named after the author). I was expecting a tract and so was astonished by its amazing success as a work of art. Smith is pitch-perfect in capturing a great range of voices among both races and all classes of the 1920s rural and small-town South, in a style that might be a fusion of Zora Neale Hurston and the early Eudora Welty. Her phrasing