Midway through Chester Himes’s 1945 novel If He Hollers Let Him Go, the main characters argue over the comparative merits of Richard Wright’s Native Son and Lillian Smith’s Strange Fruit. One character argues that “what Lillian Smith does is condemn the white Southerner” while “all Wright did was write a vicious crime story.” The protagonist, Bob Jones, replies that he thinks “the white Southerner doesn’t mind being just like Lillian Smith portrays him.”

Banned by the US postal service for its depiction of an interracial relationship, Smith’s bestselling 1944 novel prompted discussion across the United States about segregation, racial violence, and Southern identity, making Strange Fruit a prominent book of the pre-Civil Rights Era South. Smith, who ran a summer camp in the mountains in Northern Georgia was suddenly launched into national acclaim, and soon after the novel’s publication travelled to New York to work on Strange Fruit’s Broadway adaptation.

“Lillian Smith’s Strange Fruit and Periodical Readerships,” winner of the Research Society for American Periodicals Article Prize 2024-25, argues that Smith anticipated and in fact encouraged the debates around the novel through the magazine she edited between 1936 and 1945, South Today. The magazine, co-edited with Smith’s partner Paula Snelling, cultivated an engaged readership who were primed to critique depictions of the South through book reviews, editorials, and tests for the reader called “Do You Know Your South?”

Not only were the magazine’s readers curated into critics of Southern culture, they were crafted into ideal readers of the novel. In the article, I uncover early drafts of Strange Fruit that appeared between 1936 and 1944. South Today’s readers saw Strange Fruit develop from a book about children in a large family learning about racism to the Romeo and Juliet-like love story it became. The magazine readers were not just crafted into the ideal, engaged readers of Strange Fruit, in these drafts, we see how Maxwell, the fictional town in the novel, is shaped by the readers of South Today. This article argues for how the discursive form of the magazine preceded and encouraged the kinds of discussion depicted in Himes’s novel.

The article is the basis for the final chapter of my forthcoming monograph The Serial South: The Little Magazine in the US South, which is under contract with the University of Georgia Press. The book explores how the features of the magazine form, such as seriality, ephemerality, and the potential for readers to write back, allowed Southern writers and editors to navigate their regional identity.