mary lee settle
1918-2005
BIO
“Mary Lee Settle must always be taken seriously, which can be said of lamentably few American novelists," a Washington Post reviewer wrote. "Her tough intelligence is a formidable presence."
Anyone who wants to write historical fiction will learn a lot from Mary Lee. Mary Lee Settle was a rebel and a skeptic. She grew up in Kanawha County and published 18 novels and nonfiction books before she died at age 83. All her life, she rebeled against her upper middle-class upbringing. She dropped out of Sweetbrier College to join the Navy and World War II. Later, she wrote about English revolutionaries, Civil War families, striking miners, and other brave
people fighting impossible odds.
Anyone who wants to get to know Mary Lee may want to start with Addie, a biography of her grandmother Addie who divorced a drunken, abusive man and married Mary Lee's wealthy grandfather, to the dismay of his family. A few lines from Addie: "There I was, a-settin' in that tree, no more than 18 years old, and already married three years to that devil. And I looked down through the branches, and there was Chris Morris, mean, drunk and down there looking for me."
Mary Lee Settle won the prestigous National Book Award for Blood Tie, but she considered her "Beulah Quintet" her master work. The five books of the Beulah Quintet (see below) take the reader from 17th-century English rebels through the Vietnam War, mostly set in Kanawha County, West Virginia.
