Strange Fruit

From front page: 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. 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 prejudice, their emotional distortions and perversions, their bewilderment, their unreasoning love and hate, their blind cruelty. Strange Fruit is a love story of intimacy and tenderness; it is also a story of two races rooted in common earth, straining towards a common happiness, yet in brutal conflict with each other.