“She has written the most profound approach yet to the race issue. A superior piece of literature from all angles. Every word she writes is true.” Birmingham News
Boston nursing school graduate Pinkey Johnson has blond hair, blue eyes and a secret– she’s actually black. She’s managed to fit in naturally among her new friends in the North, but she never quite fit within the small, southern town she came from. But now, on the eve of marrying a white doctor, and forced to tell him the truth about herself, she returns to Mississippi, where she must face the racism and inequities that are a way of life for blacks in the south of the 1940s. And yet she stays, struggling to find both herself and her place in a world that’s dangerously black and white.
This powerful, controversial novel, published in 1946, was adapted three years later into the acclaimed Elia Kazan-directed classic Pinky, which starred Jeanne Crain and earned multiple Oscar nominations.
Author Cid Ricketts Sumner (1890-1970) was a Mississippi native who went to medical school in the north, married one of her professors and, following a divorce, eventually moved back to the south for some years. She went on to writeTammy Out of Time, which led to four successful movies, a hit single, and 1960s situation comedy. When she was 80 years-old, Sumner was brutally murdered by her teenage grandson.
“Packed with social and political dynamite, but devoid of maudlin sentimentality, which sets it apart from other novels on the subject. Sumner displays profound compassion and an innate sense of justice. It should be widely read, not only because of the vital problem with which it deals, but because it is a good book written with complete honesty and sincerity” Hartford Courant
“A compelling, thought-provoking story, sympathetically told.” Marshfield News-Herald
“A minor classic, a novel written with compassion rather than passion, a quiet restraint that is even more effective.” The Commercial Appeal
“An intelligently-handled novel, sympathetically written. ” Portland Press-Herald
Cid Ricketts Sumner /
Historical, Literary Fiction
