author
Lily Hardy Hammond
1859–1925
A novelist, reformer, and church leader from the Jim Crow South, she wrote fiction and social criticism that pushed readers to think harder about race, gender, and moral responsibility. She is also often credited with the earliest known use of the phrase “pay it forward.”
1 Audiobook
In the Garden of Delight
by Lily Hardy Hammond
About the author
Born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1859, Lily Hardy Hammond was educated in private schools in Virginia and at the Packer Institute in Brooklyn before building a public life as a writer, speaker, and church worker. Contemporary biographical sources describe her as active in the women’s work of the Southern Methodist Church, and modern reference pages also note her work as a civil rights activist.
Hammond wrote both novels and nonfiction. Her books include The Master-Word (1905), In Black and White (1914), and In the Garden of Delight (1916). Modern scholarship highlights her unusually direct criticism of white southern attitudes toward Black Americans, while her earlier fiction and shorter pieces also engaged questions about women’s roles, marriage, and social reform.
She died in 1925, but her name still surfaces for two reasons: her searching writing about southern life and race, and her connection to the phrase “pay it forward,” which is often traced to In the Garden of Delight. No suitable verified portrait image was confirmed from the sources reviewed here, so a profile image is not included.