Making It New: 1900–1945 457James T. Farnell (1904–1979), which doggedly charts the representative life and
death of a young urban Irishman. It also includes the strange supernaturalism of the
stories of poor mountain people in The Hawk’s Done Gone (1941) by Mildred Haun
(1911–1966) and accounts of similarly poor, but heroic, mountain folk in Mountain
Path (1936) and The Dollmaker (1954) by Harriette S. Arnow (1908–1984) that are
an extraordinary blend of realism and romantic lyricism. What blanket references
to social protest also manage to conceal is that, for many, commitment was sustained
and remained an inspiration throughout their career but inspired a rich variety
of activity and expression. Among these was Lillian Smith (1897–1966), the leading
Southern white liberal of the mid-twentieth century, who devoted her life to lifting
self-deception in the South about race, class, gender, and sexuality. Born into an
upper-class family in the Deep South, Smith emerged into public debate in
opposition to the Agrarians. She produced a small literary magazine, Pseudopodia,
later changed to North Georgia Review and then South Today, which she co-edited
with Paula Snelling. Then, in 1945, she produced her most famous book, Strange
Fruit. At once the love story of a mulatto girl and a powerful critique of racial
prejudice, it became a bestseller. Her other novel, One Hour, appeared sixteen years
later; it is about the response of a Southern town to the hysterical accusation of
immorality that a young girl makes against an older man. But her notable work,
apart from Strange Fruit, is her journalism, her works on civil rights, Now is the Time
(1955) and Our Faces, Our Words (1964), and, above all, her autobiographical
critique of Southern culture, Killers of the Dream (1949). “By the time we were five
years old,” Smith recalls in Killers of the Dream, “we had learned ... that masturbation
is wrong and segregation is right.” “We believed certain acts were so wrong that they
must never be committed,” she adds later, “and then we committed them and denied
to ourselves that we had done so.” Which, Smith explains, issued for her and
Southerners like her in a “split” mind, “a two-level existence.” That is characteristic
of Smith at her best throughout her varied career. She recognized that her society’s
concepts of race invariably interacted with those of gender, sexuality, and class. And
although she rarely considered class apart from race, issues of gender and sexuality
are persistent in her work. Her writing was controversial precisely because it explored
the interrelatedness of her culture’s attitudes toward race and sexuality and the ways
in which the South’s institutions perpetuated a dehumanizing existence for all its
people – male and female, white and black, rich and poor.
Three other writers whose concern with social issues was woven like a thread
through the varied tapestry of their careers are Lillian Hellman (1905–1984),
Mary McCarthy (1912–1989), and Meridel Le Sueur (1900–1996). Hellman came to
public attention with a series of successful plays. Her first, The Children’s Hour
(1934), shows the havoc caused by a malicious girl’s invention of a lesbian relation-
ship between her two teachers. The Little Foxes (1939) concerns the struggle of a
reactionary Southern family to retain wealth and power despite internal feuds
and the encroachments of modern society. Watch on the Rhine (1941) and The
Searching Wind (1944) are two openly political dramas, dealing with the fight against
Nazism. And other, later plays include Toys in the Attic (1964), which deals with theGGray_c04.indd 457ray_c 04 .indd 457 8 8/1/2011 7:54:00 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 00 AM