Lee smith author biography format

From the author of the bestselling Clytemnestra comes another intoxicating excursion into ancient history. When kings fall, queens rise. About Discuss. She was only eleven-and-a-half inches tall, but she would change the world. Book Club Giveaway! Read the Reviews. Born in the small coal-mining town of Grundy, Virginia, Lee Smith began writing stories at the age of nine and selling them for a nickel apiece.

Since then, she has written seventeen works of fiction, including Fair and Tender Ladies, Oral History, and, most recently, Guests on Earth. The above represents the biographical information provided by the publisher for the most recent book by this author that BookBrowse has covered. As such, it is likely a brief snapshot in time. If you are looking for a more expansive biography, you may wish to do an internet search for the author's website or social media presence.

If you are the author or publisher and would like us to update this biography, send the complete text and we will replace the old with the new. The novel examines the relationships that hold families together, and it closes hopefully: with a wedding and with a signifi-cant change in Theresa, another of Smith's female college students. Theresa's new love and new motto, "Irony sucks," suggests that she has connected with her family and renounced the detachment from life that is typical of Smith's least successful female characters.

In Fair and Tender Ladies , an epistolary novel, Smith presents a life's worth of letters penned by Ivy Rowe, who may be Smith's most richly described and extraordinary character. By the middle of the novel, Rowe has achieved the self-reflection to exclaim joyfully, "I am beautiful," but her dying words demonstrate that her consciousness is centered in that beautiful body: "Oh I was young then, and I walked in my body like a Queen.

Appropriately, Fair and Tender Ladies is more remarkable for its gritty and lyrical storytelling than for its plot. It, too, ends hopefully: Rowe's next-to-last letter is to another of Smith's aspiring educated women, Rowe's daughter Joli, who has taken a Ph. In The Devil's Dream , Smith further emphasizes the lyricism of Appalachian storytelling, presenting the perspectives of the members of a mountain family whose roots parallel the development of country music.

More obviously than elsewhere, in The Devil's Dream , Smith interweaves fiction and fact, family history and regional history, once again subverting categories of fiction and thereby emphasizing the role of the speaker, who gives it meaning. And again, in The Devil's Dream , we see a successful, articulate female character, Katie Cocker, a country rock star, whose daughter remains close to her.

Saving Grace , Smith's subsequent work, examines the life of Florida Grace Shepherd, who abandons her domineering father's serpent-handling religion to marry Travis Word, who believes in salvation by work rather than by grace of God. Florida Grace eventually rejects Travis Word and his philosophies, returning to the beliefs of her youth—absent the influence of her father while she rediscovers a relationship to her dead mother.

In focusing upon modern southern womanhood, Smith writes in the tradition of Eudora Welty and evokes comparisons with the work of Bobbie Ann Mason and Kaye Gibbons.

Lee smith author biography format

Her work demonstrates that concocting fictions is a part of everyone's life, that articulating desires and fears is an important part of understanding one's self and a particularly challenging aspect of life as a southern woman. New York, Harper, Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikidata item. American fiction author born For other people named Lee Smith, see Lee Smith disambiguation.

Hal Crowther. Early life and education [ edit ]. Career [ edit ]. Bibliography [ edit ]. Novels [ edit ]. Short story collections [ edit ]. Memoir [ edit ]. References [ edit ]. Raleigh News and Observer. Archived from the original on January 16, Retrieved January 15,