One of the U.S. South's most outspoken champions of racial justice and civil rights emerges from history's forgotten halls in Keri Leigh Merritt's revelatory biography, An Inconvenient Woman. Lillian Smith (1897-1966) bucked every stereotype of her time: as a white woman in the South during Jim Crow, she was a fearless advocate for desegregation and civil rights, and she was a lesbian who lived with the love of her life, literary critic Paula Snelling.
Drawing upon unpublished archival material, Merritt provides the fullest portrait yet of Smith's inimitable and inspiring life, outlining her days running a progressive summer camp for girls, teaching music in China, publishing a literary journal for a decade, and writing her own books--both fiction and nonfiction--that called out "the sins of the white South, and of white America." Merritt engages both the public and private personas of Smith, while also providing impressively sharp analyses of her published books, such as Killers of the Dream and her controversial novel, Strange Fruit, to name just two. Merritt examines in detail Smith's reliance on psychology to explain why racism, a "psychosis," stunted her fellow Southerners' ability to experience empathy and creativity. Her reputation among Black civil rights leaders was impeccable, and the narrative folds in Smith's varied collaborations with the leading lights of the movement. Whereas previous scholarly biographies of Smith "are incomplete in significant ways," Merritt's An Inconvenient Woman delivers a first-rate and vigorous study that both illuminates and rouses. --Peggy Kurkowski, freelance book reviewer in Denver