Bringing together short stories, lectures, essays, op-ed pieces, interviews, andexcerpts from her longer fiction and nonfiction, A Lillian Smith Reader offers thefirst comprehensive collection of her work.

Prelude and aftermath of a lynching in Georgia, depicting the South's unsolved racial problem.

Author cites the evils of segregation for both white and colored people and gives the history of race relations from pre-Civil War days.

In 1926, Lillian Alling, a European immigrant, set out on a journey home from New York. She had little money and no transportation, but plenty of determination. In the three years that followed, Alling walked all the way to Dawson City, Yukon, crossing the North American continent on foot. Finally, on a make-shift raft, she sailed alone down the Yukon River from Dawson City all the way to the Bering Sea. Lillian Alling has been the subject of novels, plays, epic poems, an opera and more tall tales than can be remembered, but as legendary as she may be, the true story of Lillian Alling has never been told. Lillian Alling: The Journey Home is a collection of personal documents, first-hand recollections, family tales and archival research that provide tantalizing new clues to Lillians story. Smith-Josephy places Lillian firmly in the context of history and among the cast of unique and colourful characters she met along her journey.

In southern graveyards through the first decades of the twentieth century, the Confederate South was commemorated by tombstones and memorials, in Confederate flags, and in Memorial Day speeches and burial rituals. Cemeteries spoke the language of southern memory, and identity was displayed in ritualistic form -- inscribed on tombs, in texts, and in bodily memories and messages. Katharine DuPre Lumpkin, Lillian Smith, and Pauli Murray wove sites of regional memory, particularly Confederate burial sites, into their autobiographies as a way of emphasizing how segregation divided more than just southern landscapes and people. Darlene O'Dell here considers the southern graveyard as one of three sites of memory -- the other two being the southern body and southern memoir -- upon which the region's catastrophic race relations are inscribed. O'Dell shows how Lumpkin, Smith, and Murray, all witnesses to commemorations of the Confederacy and efforts to maintain the social order of the New South, contended through their autobiographies against Lost Cause versions of southern identity. Sites of Southern Memory elucidates the ways in which these three writers joined in the dialogue on regional memory by placing the dead southern body as a site of memory within their texts. In this unique study of three women whose literary and personal lives were vitally concerned with southern race relations and the struggle for social justice, O'Dell provides a telling portrait of the troubled intellectual, literary, cultural, and social history of the American South.

Conflict, exoticism, sensuality, eccentricity, and the sheer differences of the American South pervade this lively anthology, the first in fifty years to focus exclusively on the nineteenth-century tradition of southern local color. Its thirty-one stories, spanning the 1870s through the early 1900s, represent some of the best southern fiction to appear during the great flowering of American local color writing. The fifteen authors included here are those most admired by their contemporaries. Modern readers may recognize Kate Chopin, author of The Awakening; Charles Chesnutt, the courageous and gifted African American writer; or Joel Chandler Harris, whose Uncle Remus and Br'er Rabbit tales have remained continually in print. However some authors like suffragist Sarah Barnwell Elliott, are virtually unknown today, while others, like African Americans Paul Laurence Dunbar and Alice Dunbar-Nelson, are known primarily as poets or diarists. The editors' extensive introduction locates the stories in the context of contemporary and current history and culture, and each selection of tales begins with detailed information on the author. Also included are bibliographies and extensive notes. Showcasing the many styles, topics, and settings of southern local color, the anthology reconnects us to an unjustly neglected literary tradition. As the editors make clear, such tales of the South were essential to post-Civil War America's struggle to address--yet contain--cultural and geographic variety, racial mixtures, and the just clamor of women and African Americans for equality. From George Washington Cable's New Orleans to Thomas Nelson Page's Tidewater Virginia to the Appalachians imagined by Sherwood Bonner, these stories engage nation-shaping themes--war, segregation, immigration, depression, and suffrage--at the personal and community levels. In Southern Local Color we have a unique forum for pondering a timeless American question: how to reconcile our diversities with a unified national identity.