Kirkus reviews the book in its August 15, 2026 issue:
Battling white supremacy.
Historian Merritt recounts the life and career of civil rights activist, novelist, and editor Lillian Smith (1897-1966), a white woman from Georgia whose friends included Eleanor Roosevelt, Pauli Murray, and Martin Luther King Jr. and whose admirers included W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Pearl S. Buck. Born and raised in Jasper, Florida, in a large, well-to-do family, Smith learned a Methodism rooted “in love, acceptance, and understanding.” In Georgia, where her family settled; in China, where she spent three years as a music teacher; and in her travels, she became increasingly aware of racism, Jim Crow, and the insidious plague of white supremacy that beset American society. These themes emerged in her first novel, Strange Fruit, published in 1944. Although the book met with outrage in some quarters, it was critically acclaimed overall, selling some 3 million copies during Smith’s lifetime. Besides focusing on racism and classism, her fiction also considered romantic attraction between women, reflecting her lifelong relationship with Paula Snelling. Together, the women founded and edited an influential literary magazine, South Today, which welcomed contributions from Black writers. Likening white supremacy to Nazism, Smith argued that violence and anger, both rooted in fear, hurt whites as well as Blacks. She condemned evangelical Christianity for fueling racism and hate. Merritt offers a close overview of Smith’s prolific writings, which included fiction, essays, and memoir; and she follows her involvement in civil rights organizations that promoted nonviolence. In her last decades, Smith suffered recurring bouts of aggressive breast cancer, requiring debilitating—and expensive—treatments and surgeries, that eventually caused her death. Merritt portrays her as a fighter: determined and brave in the face of illness, censorship, book bans, arson, and death threats.
An appreciative portrait of a defiant woman.
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.