Wilma Dykeman and Lillian Smith: Appalachian Activist Women Writers

In the early 1940s, Asheville writer Wilma Dykeman visited Lillian Smith and her companion Paula Snelling at their home at the top of old Screamer Mountain in Clayton, Georgia. This meeting initiated years of correspondence between the writers until Smith’s death in 1966. Both women shared similar views related to race and to women’s issues, and both women wrote about these issues throughout extensive writing careers. Dr. Claxton will discuss Smith’s controversial novel Strange Fruitand her groundbreaking nonfiction work Killers of the Dream, which details the psychological impact of a segregated South on white and black southerners. For Dykeman, she will discuss her work Neither Black nor White(1957), co-written with her husband Jim Stokely, based on interviews they conducted in the South asking people from all walks of life their views about race and desegregation.

Dr. Mae Miller Claxton is a Professor of English at Western Carolina University teaching classes in Southern, Appalachian, and Native American literature. Her scholarship focuses primarily on Eudora Welty, but she has recently expanded her interests to Horace Kephart, Appalachian women writers, and the Native South. Her most recent publication, along with co-editor George Frizzell, is a collection of Horace Kephart’s writings.