Like other fans of Smith’s writing, I have been continuously drawn to her Southern (often Appalachian) characters and settings, periodically rereading Fair and Tender Ladies, for example, to revisit the mesmerizing Ivy Rowe at her farm in Sugar Fork on Blue Star Mountain.

The voices she has generated have become background music to my own life, as they have for so many readers. Since then, I have with great pleasure read everything Smith has written. Struck by the power of that book, I bought and devoured Fair and Tender Ladies, which would become and remain one of my top five novels ever. But even after 25 years of scholarly work on Lee Smith’s stories, I still find her fiction as fascinating as I did when, in the spring of 1991, I read my first of her novels, Oral History. If that subject isn’t awfully rich and hearty, the hours (let alone days, weeks, years, and even decades) of analysis can render the subject into a flat, distorted, unrecognizable thing. These items tell the story of Molly’s passionate journey through life.Most academics will admit, if pressed, that long-term research on a particular subject can sometimes spoil it for you. I will.” She keeps the diary in her treasured “box of phenomena” which contains “letters, poems, songs, court records, marbles, rocks, dolls, and bones, some human” by the time it is found during a historic renovation project in 2003. For evil or good this is my own true life and I WILL have it. “I know I am a spitfire and a burden,” she begins her diary. On her thirteenth birthday, orphan girl 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.

The story takes place on Agate Hill, N.C., 1872. Read the review or check out her schedule. Click Here for information on Barbara Bates Smith's new one-woman show On Agate Hill. Check out Alice Gerrard's 'The Road to Agate Hill' CD. On Agate Hill has been chosen for Western North Carolina's 'Together We Read' program involving 22 counties. Darcy and the Blue Eyed Stranger, was published in March, 2010. Her novel The Last Girls was a New York Times bestseller as well as a winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award.Ī retired professor of English at North Carolina State University, Lee received an Academy Award in Fiction from American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1999. Lee Smith is the author of twelve novels, including Oral History, Saving Grace, The Devil's Dream, Fair and Tender Ladies, and On Agate Hill plus three collections of short stories.

Oral History by Lee Smith