Strange Fruit

This book deals with interracial love. It would be unthinkable for this book to be banned nowadays, but it was banned in Boston and by the United States Postal Service when it came out in 1944.Strange Fruit is, first of all an absorbing story. Conceived with unusual breadth of understanding and sympathy, told with skill and beauty, it deals with things that the neighbors mustn't know - and it deals with the neighbors. It lays open the heart of a southern town, reveals the hidden fears and prejudices, emotional perversions, superstition, blind cruelty, unreasoning love and hate that shapes the lives of its people.Strange Fruit is a love story of deep and brooding tenderness. It is also a compassionate story of two races, white and Negro, rooted in a common earth, straining towards a common happiness, yet in a brutal conflict with each other. It faces courageously an explosive problem which we must ultimately solve not only in the South, but in all places where one race dominates another - wherever humiliation , cruelty, hatred and frustration degrade mankind , both oppressor and oppressed.The reader will be caught up at once in a swift and engrossing narrative about people whose innermost secrets from the structure and pattern of life in a small Southern town. Such is he authority, conviction, and high literary skill with which Lillian Smith tells her story, that he will come to know the Smith and to understand its people more thoroughly than ever before.Lillian Smith has written a novel that will precipitate controversy and movement to action. It is not strange that she will participate controversy and move men to action. It is not strange that she should have written such a novel, for she has devoted her life to understanding her people and her country. The daughter of one of the South's oldest families, she has fought for her people and against the evils of her region. Her purpose has been always to serve the society in which she found herself. With this novel, she has accomplished that service not merely to the society of a town but to the society of the world.A passionat e novel about two decent people, impossibly in love …. Make no mistake about it; to read STRANGE FRUIT is an emotional experience.- Lewis Gannett, Harold Tribune