Critics praised the use that Lee made of myth, ballads, and superstition - those aspects of Appalachian life that brought the young student Jennifer back to her mother’s family to tape their doings as a project for a class in Oral History. Oral History (1983) signals her first venture into this undiscovered country. A native of Grundy, Virginia - a coal mining town just over the mountain from West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee - Lee turned to Appalachia to remythologize the South in a manner that is uniquely hers. It also suggested what was to become, with further experimentation and ingenuity, Lee Smith’s territory. Black Mountain Breakdown to this day remains the darkest chronicle in her fiction. The reader last sees Crystal Renee Spangler in catatonic withdrawal, lying in her childhood bedroom. It is, as she herself has said, a dramatization of the consequences of passivity - the terrible state that results when a woman accepts too easily the roles given her by men. But - in retrospect - one realizes that not unlike Faulkner in Mosquitoes and Pylon, Lee had not yet found her territory, her place.īlack Mountain Breakdown (1981) was the first of her novels to gain wide critical attention. Growing out of her newspaper coverage of the Tuscaloosa, Alabama, sesquicentennial celebration, her next novel, Fancy Strut (1973), introduced the fine, often sharp humor that has become a trademark of her stories. Her second novel, Something in the Wind (1971), the portrait of a young college woman, confirmed that a notable talent had found publication. Rubin, Jr., at Hollins College, during her senior year a draft of her first novel, The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed (1980), and some short stories gained her one of twelve national Book of the Month Club Writing Fellowships. Participating during the 1960s in the writing program founded by Louis D. When she read from her work at The College of Wooster in November 1988 - the occasion which led to the Artful Dodge interview with her - I suggested to the audience during my introduction that her success might give heart to any undergraduate who aspired to write. By doing this, a hard-nosed trade publisher recognized the reader appeal and critical acclaim which has placed Lee Smith at the forefront of Southern writers during the 1980s.

Ballantine also said that it would simultaneously reissue her last four novels and her collection of short stories, Cakewalk (1980).

BALLANTINE BOOKS’ ANNOUNCEMENT in August 1989, that they would issue a paperback edition of Fair and Tender Ladies within a year of its original publication could only delight anyone acquainted with Lee Smith’s fiction.

Oral History by Lee Smith