Works by
Lee Smith
(Writer)

Novels

• On Agate Hill (2006)
  It is 1872, Agate Hill, North Carolina. On her thirteenth birthday, Molly Petree peeps out the chink of a window from her secret hiding place up in the eaves of a tumbledown old plantation house to survey a world gone wild, all expectations overthrown, all order gone. “I know I am a spitfire and a burden,” she begins her diary. “I do not care. My family is a dead family, and this is not my home, for I am a refugee girl…but evil or good I will write it all down every true thing in black and white upon the page, for evil or good it is my own true life and I WILL have it. I will.”
  
  Carefully she places the diary in her treasured “box of phenomena” which will contain “letters, poems, songs, court records, marbles, rocks, dolls, and a large collection of bones, some human and some not” by the time it is found during a historic renovation project in 2003.
  
  The contents of Molly’s box make up this extraordinary novel which chronicles her passionate, picaresque journey across” the whole curve of the earth” –through love, betrayal, motherhood, a murder trial---and finally back to Agate Hill to end her days under circumstances that even she could never have imagined.

• The Last Girls (2003)
  Thirty years ago, the girls in an American literature seminar at an idyllic Blue Ridge campus made their own trip down the Mississippi River on a raft, inspired by Huckleberry Finn. Now a tragedy brings them back together for a repeat voyage under very different circumstances on the luxurious steamboat Belle of Natchez. Somebody takes a trip is the oldest plot of all, these English majors learned in college, but the archetypal heroic journey has proved a woefully inadequate plot for tracing these women's life stories, now caught in the painful decisions and realizations of middle age.
  
  This darkly comic novel examines the nature of story itself: How do we ever know what is true? How much does the story depend upon the changing needs of the storyteller? and how is it told or not told, in the case of timid schoolteacher Harriet Holding, who has put her entire life under a bell jar ever since the traumatic events of college, now thrown into a new perspective as the Belle of Natchez makes her way down the Mississippi towards New Orleans.

  • Courtney Gray Ralston struggles to step from the pages of Southern Living for her unlikely sweetheart, not even pictured in the voluminous scrapbooks she has dutifully maintained and lugged on board to share with the others.

  • Catherine Hurt is suddenly suffocating even in her happy third marriage. Her husband Russell's midlife crisis is just wearing her out, as he jogs around and around the Observation Deck monitoring his health, contemplating his death, and fantasizing about TV weather girls.

  • The tale of tragic Baby, Harriet's brilliant and promiscuous roommate, is told in her poems from that other, long-ago voyage.

  • Anna Todd Trethaway is a world-famous romance novelist who escapes the tragedies of her own life through her fiction. She spends hours in her stateroom each day writing The Louisiana Purchase, the latest in her wildly successful Confederacy Series (Tupelo Honey, Rainy Night in Georgia, The Tennessee Stud, The Missouri Compromise...) But has Anna become one of her own creations?

  The Last Girls is an often funny yet very serious exploration of the nature of romance, the relationship between life and fiction, the relevance of the past to the present, and of the unexpected course of women's lives.

• Fancy Strut (1996)
  Speed, Alabama, is frantically preparing for the event of a lifetime: Sesquicentennial Week. And all her proud citizens are kicking up their heels in a lively, pompous fancy strut....

• The Christmas Letters (1996)
  The Christmas Letters  returns to the epistolary style of Fair and Tender Ladies. The novella opens with Birdie Puckett writing to her mother and sister about life on a North Carolina farm in 1944. In parts 2 and 3, Birdie's daughter and granddaughter continue the letter-writing tradition that spans and links the three generations. The focus shifts from Birdie to her daughter Mary and her life as a new mother, later as a woman whose marriage has turned sour, and finally as a Peace Corps volunteer.

• Saving Grace (1995)
  Saving Grace is the story of Florida Grace Shepherd, the 11th child of a traveling evangelist who takes up serpents and gulps strychnine to confirm his faith. But her father's religion terrifies Grace, who says, "I loved Daddy and Momma, but I did not love Jesus"--and that's only one of the many kinds of exile she endures. Like other of Smith heroines, Grace is cut off, not just from Jesus, but from herself, too, and every decision she makes, everything she yearns for, comes to seem like a betrayal of one sort or another.

• The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed (1994)

• Devil's Dream (1992)
  In 1990 Lee Smith won the Lyndhurst Prize to study country music, and her research resulted in The Devil's Dream (1992), yet another multi-generational family saga. The story of the musical Bailey family (loosely based, Smith says, on the legendary Carter family), it plumbs nearly a century's worth of history to tell the story of the family's most successful descendant, Katie Cocker, whose career flourishes once she hits Nashville.
  
  But The Devil's Dream is really concerned with the problem of success, which, for Katie--as well as for other country musicians and perhaps for all of us--carries within it the genesis of failure. "What you want, of course, is to be successful," Smith says. "You're always singing of home, but you're never home. And there's something about that--I think I feel like that about a lot of things, this intense ambivalence."

• Fair and Tender Ladies (1988)
  Among her most devoted readers, Fair and Tender Ladies is probably Smith's most beloved book; Smith says she knows of at least four babies named for the novel's indomitable heroine, Ivy Rowe. This epistolary novel chronicles the life of Ivy, a tenacious mountain woman who remains cussedly dedicated to the ideal of perseverance, despite the many formidable obstacles she faces. It is considered by many to be Smith's most fully realized and artistically successful work.

• Family Linen (1985)
  Family Linen, another multi-generational mystery, continues and expands upon some of the themes and techniques Smith began working with in Oral History. This time around, though, the mystery is a more conventional one, at least on its surface: Did Sybill Hess long ago witness the murder of her father, or is it a trick of the memory? Did her mother really take an axe to him and dump his body in a backyard well? To answer these questions, Smith again uses multiple points of view; but, of course, instead of clearing up the matter, Family Linen's irreconcilable narratives succeed only in raising more--and more profound--questions.

• Oral History (1983)
  Oral History remains one of Lee Smith's most ambitious works. She uses multiple points of view to tell the story of the Cantrell family, a story that spans the better part of a century. The Cantrells are a mountain family who inhabit the hills and environs of Hoot Owl Holler. Jennifer, a citified descendant of the Cantrells, arrives to record an "oral history" of her family for a college course, and all the old stories unscroll. But Oral History is finally the story of Dory, a lovely enigmatic woman who the many narrators attempt--through the telling of her story--to understand. In the end, however, Dory remains a mystery.
  
  Smith says that's because "no matter who's telling the story, it is always the teller's tale, and you never finally know exactly the way it was. I guess I see some sort of central mystery at the center of the past, of any past, that you can't, no matter what a good attempt you make at understanding how it was, you never can quite get at it."

• Black Mountain Breakdown (1980)
  Black Mountain Breakdown is Lee Smith's first novel set in the mountains of Appalachia--in Black Rock, a fictional coal-mining town very much like Grundy. It is the story of Crystal Spengler's fall from innocence, as well as an object lesson in the perils of passivity--a turn of disposition, Smith says, to which many Southern women are particularly susceptible.
  
  The novel traces the arc of Crystal's evolution from a romantic, daydreaming girl of 12 to an hysterically catatonic woman of 32. Black Mountain Breakdown is not only a much darker book than Smith's previous novels, but also a more mature novel.

Short Stories

• News of the Spirit (1997)
  Many of the Southern women in Smith's latest collection of short fiction (following the novels Saving Grace and The Christmas Letters) view storytelling as a means of survival. In prose that's direct and simple, by turns bitterly funny and lyrical, Smith inhabits the voices of women young and old as they try to muddle through the chaos of their lives. In two coming-of-age stories, "The Bubba Stories" and "Live Bottomless," college student Charlene and 13-year-old Jenny portray themselves and their worlds (mid-1960's collegiate life and late '50's suburbia, respectively) with steely humor and an unrelenting eye. For these two aspiring writer types, storytelling and identity are deeply intertwined.
  
  The same goes for the long-estranged twins, Paula and Johnny, of the title story, who find that the deep connection between them has its origins in the storytelling and make-believe play of their childhood. And in "The Happy Memories Club," a moribund nursing home resident finds that writing down her life story is the only way she can recover the acerbic but passionate self she's repressed for so long. Smith excels at creating characters somewhat boggled by the reality of who they've become--by their lovers and homes, their jobs and their cars, haircuts and bodies--and who, consequently, feel a pressing need to explain themselves to themselves. One thing they never doubt is the correctness of their opinions, especially concerning the proper standards of behavior for a Southern lady, and the failings of "white trash."

• Me and My Baby View the Eclipse (1990)
  "Extremely powerful...Me and My Baby View the Eclipse is about the striving and the secret nobility of people who live in a small-town American South. In these stories -- thank heaven -- not everything fits: they are loose, they are sometimes awkward, but just about every one shines with revelation and awe in the face of momentary greatness and tragedy....Nearly every one of the stories could move a reader to tears, for in almost every one of them there is a moment of vision, or love, or unclothed wonder that transforms something plain into something transcendent."  -- The New York Times Book Review

• Cakewalk (1981)
  In these dazzling stories, acclaimed author Lee Smith wants you to meet:

  • Mrs. Joline B. Newhouse, who writes a "fortnightly" newspaper column called "Between the Lines."

  • Georgia Rose, the girl whose life is more like a soap opera than the TV serial she's addicted to.

  • Martha Rasnick, the young housewife in "Dear Phil Donahue" who writes all her troubles to the TV personality.

  • Florrie, the cake lady in "Cakewalk" who causes her prissy sister no end of embarrassment by "wearing running shoes, at her age, and wooly white athletic socks that fall in crinkles down around her ankles."

Other

• Good Ol' Girls
  "Like A Chorus Line for women."
  
  That’s the way Southern author Lee Smith (Fair and Tender Ladies, Oral History) explains Good Ol’ Girls, a musical featuring the stories of Smith and novelist and short story writer Jill McCorkle (Ferris Beach, July 7th) as well as the songs of Matraca Berg and Marshall Chapman. The New York Times called it “a feminist literary country music review” and Smith agreed saying, “It’s a show with attitude—not a show for belles!”