Into this novel of the love of a white man and a beautiful, educated Negro girl, and of the violence that was only in one sense the outcome of their love,Lillian Smith has woven all the agony and frustration, the fear and guilt, which so disturb and degrade not only the relationships of Negro and white, but the individual soul as well. Rebecca West called the Greenville, South Carolina, lynching party "important as an indication of misery." Lillian Smith too has seen this misery, and seen it deeply. In Strange Fruit she lays open the heart of a Southern town, and penetrates to the secret core of its people—their hidden pride and prejudicę, their emotional distortions and perversions, their bewilderment, their unreasoning love and hate, their blind cruelty. Her spectrum of characters is wide; even the minor characters are clearly seen, precisely defined, so that each adds a tone, a value, in the complex social fabric she describes.
Strange Fruit is a love story of intimacy and tenderness; it is also a story of two races, white and Negro, rooted in a common earth, straining toward a common happiness, yet in brutal conflict with each other. Lillian Smith writes with feeling and power, facing courageously an explosive problem which must ultimately be solyed not only in the South, but in all places where one race or group oppresses another. Lewis Gannett called Strange Fruit: "A passionate novel about two decent people, impossibly in love. . . . Make no mistake about it; to read (it) is an emotional experience." And William Du Bois: "An important book, by any standard. . . . One of the most important novels to come out of the South in years."
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Strange Fruit, first published by Reynal and Hitchcock in 1945, has sold to date* well over two and a half million copies.
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*styczeń 1950, data wydania mojego egzemplarza (przyp. mój, MSN)
- Autor: Lillian Smith
- Kategoria: literatura obyczajowa, romans
- Język: polski
- ISBN: 000-00-0000-00-0
- Data wydania: 1950-01-01
- Liczba stron: 260
- Ocena: 0,0
- Wydawnictwo: Signet Books
