Lee Smith (author)

Lee Smith (born on November 1, 1944) is an American fiction author who typically incorporates much of her home roots in the Southeastern United States in her works of literature. She has received many writing awards, such as the O. Henry award and the Academy Award For Literature. Her recent book The Last Girls was listed on the New York Times bestseller's list.

Early life and education

Lee Smith was born in 1944 in Grundy, Virginia, a small coal-mining town in the Appalachian Mountains, less than 10 miles from the Kentucky border. The Smith home sat on Main Street, and the Levisa Fork River ran just behind it. Her mother, Virginia, was a college graduate who had come to Grundy to teach school.

Growing up in the Appalachian Mountains of southwestern Virginia, nine-year-old Lee Smith was already writing—and selling, for a nickel apiece—stories about her neighbors in the coal boomtown of Grundy and the nearby isolated "hollers."

After spending her last two years of high school at St. Catherine's School in Richmond, Virginia, Smith enrolled at Hollins College in Roanoke. She and fellow student Annie Dillard (the well-known essayist and novelist) became go-go dancers for an all-girl rock band, the Virginia Woolfs. It was in 1966, during her senior year at Hollins, that Smith's literary career began to take off. She submitted an early draft of a coming-of-age novel to a Book-of-the-Month Club contest and was awarded one of twelve fellowships. Two years later, that novel, "The Last Day the Dog Bushes Bloomed" (Harper & Row, 1968), became Smith's first published work of fiction.

Since 1968, she has published eleven novels, as well as two collections of short stories, and has received eight major writing awards.

Career

Following her graduation from Hollins, Smith married a poet and teacher, whom she accompanied from university to university as his teaching assignments changed. She kept busy writing reviews for local papers and raising two little boys, but found little time for her own fiction. By 1971, though, she'd completed her second novel, "Something in the Wind", which garnered generally favorable reviews. But her next novel, "Fancy Strut" (1973), was widely praised by critics as a comic masterpiece.

In 1974 Smith and her family moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where she finished "Black Mountain Breakdown" (1981), a much darker work than her readers had come to expect. Next she turned her attention to short stories, for which she won O. Henry Awards in 1978 and 1980. Smith published her first collection of short stories "Cakewalk" in 1981. It was also about this time that her marriage broke up, and she accepted a teaching job at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, where she teaches today. In 1983 her fifth novel, "Oral History", became a Book-of-the-Month Club featured selection, exposing Smith for the first time to a wide national audience. In 1985 she published "Family Linen" and married journalist Hal Crowther, to whom she dedicated the new book.

Since then, Smith has published "Fair and Tender Ladies" (1988) and "Me and My Baby View the Eclipse" (1990), her second book of short stories. In 1992 she published "The Devil's Dream", a generational saga about a family of country musicians; in 1995 her ninth novel, "Saving Grace", and in 1996 the novella "The Christmas Letters", her eleventh work of fiction. "News of the Spirit", a collection of stories and novellas was published in 1997. She published New York Times Bestseller "The Last Girls" in 2002. "On Agate Hill", her most recent book, is in the style of the nineteenth century epistolary novel and is set in the South during the Reconstruction.

Lee Smith currently lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina and Jefferson, NC. Her latest novel, "On Agate Hill", contains some characters based upon historical people from the Burwell School, an early female boarding school. The Burwell School is now run as a historic site and is located near Lee's own house in Hillsborough.

External links

* [http://www.leesmith.com/ Lee Smith - the official author website]
*
* [http://www.burwellschool.org/resources/OnAgateHill.php The Burwell School Historic Site]
* [http://www.librarything.com/author/smithlee LibraryThing author profile]
* [http://www.readthehook.com/stories/2007/03/22/HOTSEAT-smith-B.rtf.aspx "Obsessive love: Lee Smith happy to be back in town"] article in the Hook weekly