Smith, Lee 1944–

PERSONAL:

Born November 1, 1944, in Grundy, VA; daughter of Ernest Lee (in business) and Virginia (a teacher) Smith; married James E. Seay (a poet), June, 1967 (divorced); married Hal Crowther (a journalist), June, 1985; children: (first marriage) Josh, Page. Education: Hollins College, B.A., 1967.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Chapel Hill, NC. Office—English Department, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695-8105. Agent—Liz Darhansoff, 1220 Park Ave., New York, NY 10028. E-mail—info@leesmith.com.

CAREER:

Tuscaloosa News, Tuscaloosa, AL, feature writer, film critic, and editor of Sunday magazine, 1968-69; Harpeth Hall School, Nashville, TN, seventh-grade teacher, 1971-73; Carolina Friends School, Durham, NC, teacher of language arts, 1974-77; University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, lecturer in creative writing, 1977-81; North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, member of English department faculty, 1981—. Member of advisory board of P.E.N.

MEMBER:

North Carolina Writers Network.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Book-of-the-Month Club fellowship, 1967, for The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed; O. Henry Award from Doubleday, 1979, for "Mrs. Darcy Meets the Blue-Eyed Stranger at the Beach," and 1981, for "Between the Lines"; Sir Walter Raleigh Award, 1984; North Carolina Award for Literature, 1985; Weatherford Award for Appalachian fiction, 1988; Lyndhurst grant, 1990-92; Robert Penn Warren Prize for Fiction, 1991; Lila Wallace/Reader's Digest Award, 1995-97; Academy Award in Literature, American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1999; Southern Book Critics Circle Award, 2002, for The Last Girls.

WRITINGS:

NOVELS

The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed, Harper (New York, NY), 1968.

Something in the Wind, Harper (New York, NY), 1971.

Fancy Strut, Harper (New York, NY), 1973.

Black Mountain Breakdown, Putnam (New York, NY), 1980.

Oral History (Literary Guild alternate selection), Putnam (New York, NY), 1983.

Family Linen, Putnam (New York, NY), 1985.

Fair and Tender Ladies, Putnam (New York, NY), 1988.

The Devil's Dream, Putnam (New York, NY), 1992.

Saving Grace, Putnam (New York, NY), 1995.

News of the Spirit, Putnam (New York, NY), 1997.

The Last Girls, Algonquin Books (Chapel Hill, NC), 2002.

On Agate Hill, Algonquin Books (Chapel Hill, NC), 2006.

OTHER

Cakewalk (short stories), Putnam (New York, NY), 1980.

Me and My Baby View the Eclipse: Stories, Putnam (New York, NY), 1990.

Appalachian Portraits, photographs by Shelby Lee Adams, University Press of Mississippi (Jackson, MS), 1993.

We Don't Love with Our Teeth, Chinook Press (Portland, OR), 1994.

The Christmas Letters: A Novella, Algonquin Books (Chapel Hill, NC), 1996.

(Editor) Sitting on the Courthouse Bench: An Oral History of Grundy, Virginia, Tryon Publishing (Chapel Hill, NC), 2000.

Conversations with Lee Smith, Linda Tate, editor, University Press of Mississippi (Jackson, MS), 2001.

Contributor to periodicals, including Redbook, McCall's, Mademoiselle, and Writer.

SIDELIGHTS:

Lee Smith "is to southern writing what the New South is to the South," wrote critic Katha Pollitt in the New York Times Book Review. "Hers is a South divested of mystery, of broodings about hellfire and race and fatal family history…. It is a South of football games and miniature golf courses, of chain stores and the go-getting Rotarians who manage them, of tract homes on streets with names like Country Club Circle. Her heroines get their ideas from women's magazines and soap operas, and, if they are very daring, from Phil Donahue."

Smith came by her literary aspirations as a nine-year-old growing up in the Appalachian mountains of Virginia. She created stories and sold them for a nickel apiece. Describing herself on her Home Page as a "deeply weird" child, Smith added that in her youth she was an insatiable reader who as a teenager explored her spiritual side by traveling to churches where serpent-handling was practiced (these scenes would be recreated in Smith's 1995 novel, Saving Grace). After publishing her first collection of short stories in 1968, Smith embarked on a career in fiction.

According to Jonathan Yardley in the Washington Post Book World, Smith is "a writer whose growth has been steady and sure." She wrote the initial version of her first novel, The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed, while attending college, and it earned Smith one of the Book-of-the-Month Club's twelve annual fellowships. The author followed that with Something in the Wind in 1971 and, in 1973, with Fancy Strut. Taking its name from a drum majorette stride resembling the goose-step, Fancy Strut earned admiring reviews for its sly comedy and generosity of spirit.

Hollins Critic reviewer Rosanne Coggeshall remarked that Black Mountain Breakdown, Smith's fourth novel, was akin to Virginia Woolf's fourth novel (Mrs. Dalloway), which signaled in her work "new dimensions in vision as well as new stylistic and technical mastery." Black Mountain Breakdown is an outgrowth of Smith's earlier "Paralysis: A True Story" and tells of Crystal Renee Spangler's evolution from a girl of twelve who catches fireflies by a river to a woman of thirty-two who lies catatonic in her childhood home; it is a novel, noted Annie Gottlieb in the New York Times Book Review, of an "ultimately doomed bid for full life." Although Black Mountain Breakdown did not earn unqualified praise—reviewers particularly criticized aspects of the plot as melodramatic—the book was generally well received. In his review for the New York Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt identified the strength of the novel with the narrator's voice: It "turns Miss Smith's story into a country music ballad or a Southern Appalachian breakdown, in the sense of the word that means a tune played for a noisy dance…. It is a voice that reveals unhesitantly every banal and tawdry detail about her slightly hickish characters without for a moment patronizing them." And despite some reservations, reviewer Caroline Thompson stated in the Los Angeles Times that "particulars of life … are splendidly observed…. They would make a Carson McCullers or a Flannery O'Connor proud."

Smith next published a collection of short stories, Cakewalk, and then went on to write the widely acclaimed Oral History. Recounting one hundred years of Cantrell family life, the novel is told through several points of view. Writing for the New York Times Lehmann-Haupt found that, similar to Black Mountain Breakdown, "what Lee Smith does best of all in this multigeneration family history is to capture the voices that tell her story…. Whatever voice Miss Smith attempts to record, her mimicry is perfect." The critic also called it "a vast improvement" over Black Mountain Breakdown and contended that "the rural folk it treats may long ago have been turned into cliches by imitators of William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty, but in Oral History, Lee Smith brings them back to life again." And admiring Smith as "a master craftsman" in the Village Voice, reviewer David Bradley felt that the novel was "deserving of unique praise." He maintained that "you could make comparisons to Faulkner and Carson McCullers, to The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Wuthering Heights. You could employ all those familiar ringing terms of praise: ‘rare,’ ‘brilliant,’ ‘unforgettable.’ But Lee Smith and Oral History make you wish that all those phrases were fresh and new, that all those comparisons had never before been made."

In 1985 Smith published Family Linen. In a review for the Detroit News, Charles Dickinson deemed it "a fine new novel" in which Smith "invites the reader in and subtly intoxicates him with the chronicle of a family only slightly more bizarre than most…. It is to Smith's credit that her characters possess dimensions of shadow and light that instill an unmistakable humanity." And in the New York Times Book Review, John Ehle noted that the book's style, as in Black Mountain Breakdown and Oral History, "is everyday, colloquial, distinctly American, casual. It is generally bent on humor, satirizing our lives, filled as they are with television adventures, daily murders, floods, plane crashes, fires, intrigue and mayhem." He concluded that in this novel of four generations "there is a certain amount of disorder, but that is true of family closets and family linen everywhere."

With Fair and Tender Ladies, a 1988 release, "Smith achieved real popularity as a teller of a wonderful story," in the view of Mary McKay. In an essay for American Women Writers, McKay elaborated: "The novel, written in the epistolary [letters] form, chronicles the lives of Ivy Rowe and again reveals Smith's deep affection for the mountains of Virginia and for the mountain people who have lived, suffered, and endured." Through her letters to her sister, Silvaney—who lives in an asylum—Ivy chronicles her "passions, secrets, hopes, and dreams," according to McKay. "Here Smith again reveals the truth behind the myths of southern womanhood, and the reality is far more solid and enduring than the fantasy."

During the 1990s Smith marked her third decade as a writer with such volumes as The Devil's Dream, Saving Grace, and The Christmas Letters. In the latter work, a novella, Smith returns to the epistolary form to tell of life on a North Carolina farm in the 1940s as seen through the eyes of three generations of women. "The long letters tend to explain their lives as much to themselves as to scattered family and friends," McKay stated. "Smith captures vividly the familiar gossipiness of letters that intimates will write each other, women's voices, the clash of generations, and ever-evolving American family life."

The title character of Saving Grace is a woman whose life is tracked from childhood to middle age. Florida Grace Shepherd—"Florida for the state I was born in and Grace for the Grace of God"—is the daughter of a preacher who handles snakes before his parishioners and commits adultery after the service. Grace's mother was described by Dorothy Scura of Southern Review as one who "grabs hot coals out of the stove in a religious frenzy [and then] hangs herself in the barn." Grace's sexual initiation comes at the hands of her half-brother, Lamar; she is abandoned by her father at a truckstop. Following in a family tradition, Grace marries a preacher, a "morose, duty-bound man with peculiar sexual notions," in Scura's words.

"Smith is in familiar territory" with Saving Grace, as Scura noted. "She has perhaps the most distinctive voice in southern fiction, and she experiments with form and point of view." The critic went on to say that Smith's novel "displays many of the strengths one expects from her: sympathetically imagined characters, lively and authentic dialogue, a flair for colloquial language. But it is, perhaps, not up to the standard of Oral History or Fair and Tender Ladies—largely because the main character's choices here are so tragically limited. Smith, too, suffers from the strictures of the grim and narrow world Grace inhabits; these prevent her from taking advantage of all her writerly resources."

Smith drew on personal memoir for her 2002 novel, The Last Girls. In 1966, the twenty-two-year-old joined a group of fifteen young women taking a raft trip down the Mississippi River, following the path described in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. In an essay posted on Smith's Web site, the author recalled a heady and challenging journey, where the women sang in jubilance, even in the face of "a hurricane that hit us before we even got to Cairo, sending the temperature down below forty degrees and driving us onto the rocks." Still, "if anything really bad happened to us, we knew we could call up our parents collect, and they would come and fix things. We expected to be taken care of. Nobody had ever suggested to us that we might ever have to make a living, or that somebody wouldn't marry us and then look after us for the rest of our lives. We all smoked cigarettes. We were all cute."

A newspaper article of the day referred to the travelers as "girls," prompting the title of Smith's novel, published thirty-six years later. The Last Girls tells of three women who reunite after three decades to visit the same river they had traversed as college students—and to scatter there the ashes of a fourth friend, recently deceased, but characterized in the book through her caustic poetry. Repressed Harriet, flamboyant Anna, and happily married Catherine may at first "threaten to be mere stereotypes," as a Publishers Weekly contributor put it, but "Smith reveals surprising truths about each character." Booklist reviewer Brad Hooper was likewise impressed by The Last Girls, saying that the author "builds this absolutely inviting, completely compelling novel around the idea that ‘whatever you're like in your youth, you're only more so with age.’"

The Reconstruction-era South is the setting for Smith's historical novel, On Agate Hill. The book recounts the story of spirited orphan Molly Petree, heir to her uncle's dilapidated North Carolina plantation, Agate Hill. Through a diary that Molly begins on her thirteenth birthday, and through various letters and other documents "written" by other characters, Smith chronicles Molly's picaresque adventures as she copes with passion, betrayal, lust, and love, ending up as an old woman back at Agate Hill. "Many of the characters and settings in On Agate Hill are the most crusty archetypes of the Southern novel—the feisty orphan, the sadistic teacher-stepmother, the demon lover, the ruined plantation," wrote Caroline Preston in a Boston Globe review. "But Smith includes the kind of quirky historic details that make Molly's story feel fresh and original." Despite finding that the novel's structuring device—the use of documents from Molly's life—gives the book a "highly improbable feel," Preston added that the book's strengths more than compensate for this weakness. On Agate Hill, she concluded, is a book "as lyrical and haunting as an Appalachian ballad." New York Times Book Review contributor Roy Hoffman also praised the novel, but observed that young Molly's voice often sounds too sophisticated and literary to be believable. Even so, he noted, "Smith's inventive storytelling [gradually] overcomes these misjudgments" and the book develops into a "rapturous and mournful love story."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

American Women Writers, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1999.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 25, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1983.

Contemporary Novelists, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 2001.

Contemporary Southern Writers, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1999.

Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1983, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1984.

Encyclopedia of World Literature in the Twentieth Century, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1999.

Hill, Dorothy Combs, Lee Smith, Twayne Publishers (New York, NY), 1992.

Parrish, Nancy C., Lee Smith, Annie Dillard, and the Hollins Group: A Genesis of Writers, Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge, LA), 1998.

Smith, Rebecca, Gender Dynamics in the Fiction of Lee Smith: Examining Language and Narrative Strategies, International Scholars Publications (San Francisco, CA), 1997.

PERIODICALS

American Spectator, December, 1995, review of Saving Grace, p. 38.

Booklist, September 1, 1996, Jennifer Henderson, review of The Christmas Letters: A Novella, p. 30; September 1, 1997, Brad Hooper, review of News of the Spirit, p. 60; May 15, 2002, Brad Hooper, review of The Last Girls, p. 1555; July 1, 2006, Brad Hooper, review of On Agate Hill, p. 9.

Books & Culture, May, 1998, review of News of the Spirit, p. 39.

Bookwatch, December, 1996, review of The Christmas Letters, p. 1.

Boston Globe, December 10, 2006, Caroline Preston, review of On Agate Hill.

Detroit News, October 6, 1985, Charles Dickinson, review of Family Linen.

English Journal, September, 1996, review of Saving Grace, p. 108.

Entertainment Weekly, December 13, 1996, review of The Christmas Letters, p. 75; October 24, 1997, Grey Lyons, review of News of the Spirit, p. 61.

Harper's, July 1, 1983, Frances Taliaferro, review of Oral History, p. 74.

Hollins Critic, April, 1981, Rosanne Coggeshall, review of Black Mountain Breakdown.

Kirkus Reviews, April 1, 1995, review of Saving Grace, p. 421; August 15, 1996, review of The Christmas Letters, p. 1183; July 15, 1997, review of News of the Spirit, p. 1060; July 1, 2002, review of The Last Girls, p. 914; June 15, 2006, review of On Agate Hill, p. 599.

Library Journal, March 1, 1981, Christine M. Hill, review of Black Mountain Breakdown, p. 577; August 1, 1997, Kay Hogan, review of News of the Spirit, p. 138; September 1, 2006, Henry L. Carrigan, review of On Agate Hill, p. 139; April 15, 2007, Rochelle Ratner, review of On Agate Hill, p. 130.

Los Angeles Times, February 16, 1981, Caroline Thompson, review of Black Mountain Breakdown.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, May 28, 1995, review of Saving Grace, p. 2.

Nation, October 1, 1983, Patricia Vigderman, review of Oral History, p. 282.

New Yorker, December 9, 1985, review of Family Linen, p. 160; August 21, 1995, review of Saving Grace, p. 129.

New York Times, March 29, 1981, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, review of Black Mountain Breakdown; July 29, 1983, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, review of Oral History, p. C21.

New York Times Book Review, March 29, 1981, Annie Gottlieb, review of Black Mountain Breakdown, p. 15; November 22, 1981, Katha Pollitt, review of Cakewalk, p. 14; February 21, 1982, review of Black Mountain Breakdown, p. 39; July 10, 1983, review of Oral History, p. 15; August 12, 1984, Frederick Busch, review of Oral History, p. 32; October 6, 1985, John Ehle, review of Family Linen, p. 15; June 21, 1987, Patricia T. O'Conner, review of Fancy Strut, p. 34; September 18, 1988, W.P. Kinsella, review of Fair and Tender Ladies, p. 9; October 8, 2006, Roy Hoffman, review of On Agate Hill.

People, November 14, 1988, Susan Toepfer, review of Fair and Tender Ladies, p. 48.

Publishers Weekly, June 29, 1984, review of Oral History, p. 103; March 27, 1995, review of Saving Grace, p. 74; August 26, 1996, review of The Christmas Letters, p. 77; July 21, 1997, review of News of the Spirit, p. 182; July 1, 2002, review of The Last Girls, p. 44; July 31, 2006, review of On Agate Hill, p. 51.

Reference & User Services Quarterly, spring, 1998, review of News of the Spirit, p. 273.

Religious Studies Review, October, 1996, review of Saving Grace, p. 344.

School Library Journal, March 1, 1989, Keddy Outlaw, review of Fair and Tender Ladies, p. 209.

Southern Living, November, 1996, review of The Christmas Letters, p. 48; March, 1998, review of News of the Spirit, p. 51; December, 1998, review of The Christmas Letters, p. 70.

Southern Review, autumn, 1997, Dorothy Scura, review of Saving Grace, p. 859.

Time, November 18, 1985, John Skow, review of Family Linen, p. 104.

Times Literary Supplement, July 21, 1989, Roz Kaveny, review of Family Linen, p. 803.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), July 16, 1995, review of Saving Grace, p. 6.

Village Voice, August 2, 1983, David Bradley, review of Oral History.

Virginia Quarterly Review, winter, 1974, review of Fancy Strut, spring, 1997, review of The Christmas Letters, p. 58.

Wall Street Journal, December 15, 1981, Edmund Fuller, review of Cakewalk, p. 30; September 6, 1983, Edmund Fuller, review of Oral History, p. 26; November 28, 1988, Willard Spiegelman, review of Fair and Tender Ladies, p. A11.

Washington Post Book World, June 15, 1983, Jonathan Yardley, "Bewitched Voices"; May 28, 1995, review of Saving Grace, p. 1.

OTHER

Bookpage,http://www.bookpage.com/ (August 21, 2002), Rosalind Smith, review of News of the Spirit.

Lee Smith Home Page,http://www.leesmith.com (July 2, 2007).