author
Lily Hardy Hammond
1859–1925
An early 20th-century American novelist and reform-minded writer, she used fiction and nonfiction to wrestle with marriage, gender roles, and racial injustice in the South. Her work feels rooted in its time while still asking bold, unsettling questions.
1 Audiobook
In the Garden of Delight
by Lily Hardy Hammond
About the author
Born in Newark, New Jersey, on September 24, 1859, Lily Hardy Hammond was educated in private schools and at the Packer Institute in Brooklyn. She later married John Dennis Hammond and became known as an author based in Tennessee.
Her writing ranged across novels, stories, poems, and social commentary. Scholars and library records describe her as a writer deeply interested in marriage, the lives of women, and interracial relations, and her book In Black and White is remembered for its unusually direct criticism of white southern attitudes toward African Americans.
Hammond died on January 24, 1925. Today she is often read both as a novelist and as a progressive southern thinker whose work connects literature with reform.