Strange Fruit

When it was first published in 1944, this novel with a curious title – taken from a Billie Holiday song about a lynching – sparked immediate It horrified some critics, prompted booksellers in Boston and Detroit to ban its sale, caused the U.S. postal service to seize copies, and tempted the public enough to make it the years’s No. 1 fiction best-seller.Why such a furor? Most notably, several instances of profanity – and a plot centered around the clandestine love affair between an educated young black woman and the white son of the town’s doctor in Georgia of the 1920s. What also distrubed reader sensibilities was how Strange Fruit captured with devastating accuracy the deep-seated racial conflicts of a tightly knot Southern town as well as the hypocrisy, the blind cruelty, and the prejudice of its residents. Deeply moving, poignant, and compassionate, this is a novel that remains as engrossing – and incendiary – as the day it was written.