How Am I to be Heard? Letters of Lillian Smith.

• Author: Egerton, Jim

One of the most striking - and consequential - changes in the modern culture of the South and the nation is the demise of letter-writing. Just fifty years ago, it was the principal means of long-distance communication; now the telephone, the fax, audio and video recorders - and, strangely, what appears to be a declining interest in communicating at all - have made lengthy and informative letters a curiosity, if not an artifact.

Too bad for us all, not only now but later. For one thing, it's going to mean that when someone like Margaret Rose Gladney comes along to gather up the correspondence of a fascinating and influential figure long since departed, there's not going to be much to go on - certainly nothing like the abundant wealth of letters written by Lillian Smith, who was without a doubt one of the most fascinating if not influential figures of the mid-century South.

The bare outline of Smith's seven decades as a Southerner is intriguing enough in itself. Born and raised in an upper-class merchant-farmer family in Florida and the north Georgia mountains (their summer home), she aspired to a career as a pianist and received some conservatory training. But a more conventional life pulled her away, and after a brief teaching experience at a Methodist mission school in China, she returned to the home near Clayton, Georgia, where her parents had moved permanently to operate their summer camp for girls. By 1930, after her father had died, Smith became the owner and manager of the camp - and she began, at about the same time, to express her thoughts and feelings on paper.

She also had entered by then into a personal relationship with Paula Snelling, a part-time counselor at the camp and a teacher the rest of the time at a school in Macon. For all of four decades, Smith and Snelling maintained a stable and intimate partnership that both they and their family and friends tacitly acknowledged as a defacto same-sex marriage. They founded a literary magazine in 1936 that changed names twice (the last being South Today), grew to a circulation of 10,000, and lasted until the mid-1940s. They also ran Laurel Falls Camp, a substantial enterprise, until 1948. Smith in the meantime wrote two books that brought her a measure of both fame and notoriety: Strange Fruit, a 1944 novel about a love affair between a white man and a black woman in the South, and Killers of the Dream, a nonfiction work of Southern social criticism, largely autobiographical and...