Word: smith
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Though fully aware of her theatrical inexperience, Novelist Lillian Smith decided to dramatize Strange Fruit herself for fear that an "outside dramatist" would misrepresent the book. Says she: "I knew it would have been easy to make a racial Romeo and Juliet out of it ... I wanted a panoramic picture of human beings-white and colored-trapped by the whole mechanism of segregation. I broke a great many rules but I knew what rules I was breaking . . . I'm proud of it ... I wouldn't change a word...
...umbrella-toting hero of this Great Adventure is the soul of Logan Pearsall Smith viewed under the aspect of eternity. Author Smith, ex-Quaker, ex-American, is one of the few contemporary writers of English prose who can afford to be so viewed. For if stylistic perfection, embalming a wry wit and a flawless sense of human folly, has any preservative powers, the four slender volumes* gathered into this brief (197-page) book have a better chance than most contemporary writing to survive the impartial ages...
Logan Pearsall Smith is the only son of a family of pious, prosperous Philadelphia Quakers. He was doomed to a career in the family bottle factory when he coaxed from his father an annuity on which he was able to live austerely, but without working, for the best part of his life. He at once set out (1888) for England, where he has remained (except for brief periods) ever since. In 1913 Logan Pearsall Smith became a British subject...
...Hypocritic Reader. In the Sussex farmhouse where he lived for some ten years as a secluded bachelor, Smith dedicated himself to discovering a literary form in which to distill his urbane reflections. One day, leafing through the pages of Charles Baudelaire's Poems in Prose, Moralist Smith found the form. It was these lapidary fragments which he called trivia, and in which he condensed the discernments, bafflements, exultations, wry exposures to society and to eternity, and shy self-revelations of the Smithian soul, which in Baudelaire's words is "vous, hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable...
Last week, gravely ill in his London home, Author Smith was not flourishing. But the trivia, which comprised his life work, were completed. Well might he ponder upon the epilogue to his first volume...