The author Lillian Smith, a longtime resident of Clayton, is best known for her novel Strange Fruit, published in 1944, and her nonfiction treatise Killers of the Dream, first published in 1949 and reissued in 1961. Both works are strong denunciations of racism and segregation in the South.
Convicts are shown circa 1909 working on one of the first graded roads in Rockdale County. The convict lease system was abolished in 1908, as one of many reforms enacted during the Progressive era, but soon chain gangs took the place of convict leasing.
Courtesy of Georgia Archives, Vanishing Georgia, #
roc063.
New York native Berendt lived off and on in Savannah for eight years, interviewing locals and gathering material for Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.
Photograph by Marion Ettlinger
Critics generally were unimpressed with the film adaptation of John Berendt's book or with The Lady Chablis, who played herself in the movie.
Courtesy of The Lady Chablis
Published by Random House in January 1994, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil quickly became known in Savannah as simply "The Book." Since that time the nonfiction narrative has sold more than three million copies in 101 printings, has been translated into twenty-three languages and appeared in twenty-four foreign editions, and has brought hundreds of thousands of tourists to Savannah.
