Booklist reviews the book:
Lillian Smith, a white Southern woman, wrote the 1944 New York Times best-selling novel Strange Fruit, about a forbidden interracial love affair that ended with a lynching. A close friend of Martin Luther King Jr., Smith wrote numerous well-received books, edited and published a literary magazine, created and produced a Broadway play, and won numerous accolades while living on her own terms. This detailed account follows the trajectory that led to her lifelong commitment as a crusader for racial equity, from her family background and upbringing to her time in China as a missionary and her emergence as a national columnist and sought-after public speaker. Historian Merritt’s insightful, engaging narrative effortlessly folds in family anecdotes and excerpts from both Smith’s personal correspondence and her published writing, set against the backdrop of twenti-eth-century civil rights activism. Merritt cites accolades from Pat Conroy and other luminaries that attest to Smith’s lasting influence long past her death from cancer in 1966. This well-documented and perceptive tribute aptly humanizes a visionary and fearless woman.
-Kathleen McBroom
An Inconvenient Woman: The Extraordinary Life of Lillian Smith, the Southerner Who Defied Jim Crow America by Keri Leigh Merritt will be published in the English language by St. Martin’s Press in North America in September 2026.
Keri Leigh Merritt, Ph.D. is a historian and writer. Her first book, Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South, won both the Bennett Wall Award from the Southern Historical Association as well as the President’s Book Award from the Social Science History Association. She has co-edited several other books, including After Life: A Collective History of Loss and Redemption in Pandemic America, and her articles have appeared in outlets from Smithsonian andAeon to The Hill and CNN.