Lillian Eugenia Smith (December 12, 1897 – September 28, 1966) was a writer and social critic of the Southern United States, known for both her non-fiction and fiction works, including the best-selling novel Strange Fruit (1944).

Smith was a White woman who openly embraced controversial positions on matters of race and gender equality.

She was a southern liberal who was unafraid to criticize segregation and to work toward the dismantling of Jim Crow laws at a time when such actions virtually guaranteed social ostracism.

Her life as the daughter of an upper middle-class civic and business leader took an abrupt turn in 1915 when her father lost his turpentine mills.

The family was not without resources, however, and relocated to their summer residence in the mountains of Clayton, Georgia, where her father had previously purchased property.

Under her direction, Laurel Falls Camp soon became very popular as an innovative educational institution known for its instruction in the arts, music, drama, and modern psychology.

The magazine encouraged writers, Black or White, to offer honest assessments of modern Southern life and to work for social and economic reform; it criticized those who ignored the Old South's poverty and racial injustice.

It quickly gained regional fame as a forum for liberal thought, undergoing two name changes to reflect its expanding scope.

In her autobiography, singer Billie Holiday wrote that Smith chose to name the book after her song "Strange Fruit", which is about lynching, although Smith maintained that the book's title referred to the "damaged, twisted people (both black and white) who are the products or results of our racist culture.

[7] In 1949, Smith wrote the book Killers of the Dream, a collection of essays that attempted to identify, challenge and dismantle the Old South's racist traditions, customs and beliefs, warning that racial segregation corrupted the soul.

This period, also referred to as the creative control over the camp, allowed her to use it as a place to discuss modern social issues, like the dangers of inequality and how to improve their society both for themselves and other women.

In response to Brown v. Board of Education, the ruling that outlawed segregation in schools, she wrote Now Is the Time (1955), calling for compliance with the new court decision.

This follows the son of a very prominent family named Tracy Deen who falls in love with Nonnie, a black woman, who he had saved from a group of white boys that were threatening to rape her.

[11] Since 1968, the Lillian Smith Book Awards have been presented annually, except for 2003 when the Southern Regional Council experienced funding shortfalls.

[13] It is meant to honor those authors who, through their outstanding writing about the American South, carry on Smith's legacy of elucidating the condition of racial and social inequity and proposing a vision of justice and human understanding.

According to Cheryl Johnson's "The Language of Sexuality and Silence in Lillian Smith's Strange Fruit", her work examines many different perspectives of American consciousness and is a great source to better understand Southern history post-Civil War through the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.