Mary Lee Settle (July 29, 1918 – September 27, 2005) was an American writer. She won the 1978

National Book Award The National Book Awards are a set of annual U.S. literary awards. At the final National Book Awards Ceremony every November, the National Book Foundation presents the National Book Awards and two lifetime achievement awards to authors. The Nat ...

for her novel ''

Blood Tie ''Blood Tie'' is a 1977 novel by American novelist Mary Lee Settle, published by Houghton Mifflin. The novel, her eighth, won the 1978 National Book Award for Fiction. With the award, Settle became the fourth woman to win the NBA in fiction out ...

''."National Book Awards – 1978"
National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2012-03-28.
(With essay by Rebecca Wolff from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog.) She was a founder of the annual PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. "Settle has gone so unnoticed by the academic community that the most recurrent subject among those few who have written about her is the fact that she has gone so unnoticed." Hurting Settle's reputation is that she does not fit clearly into any type of writer, and wrote on a wide variety of fields; this detracts from a writer's authority.

Life

Early years

Settle was born in

Charleston, West Virginia Charleston is the capital and List of cities in West Virginia, most populous city of West Virginia. Located at the confluence of the Elk River (West Virginia), Elk and Kanawha River, Kanawha rivers, the city had a population of 48,864 at the 20 ...

, the daughter of Joseph Edward and Rachel Tompkins Settle. According to one report her father was a civil engineer in charge of worker safety at coal mines. According to another he owned a coal mine in Kentucky; Mary spent her childhood in

Pineville, Kentucky Pineville () is a home rule-class city in Bell County, Kentucky, United States. It is the seat of its county. The population was 1,732 as of the 2010 census. It is located on a small strip of land between the Cumberland River and Pine Mountain ...

, interrupted by a period in Florida when her father, drawn by the Florida land rush, participated in the design of Venice, Florida. Her family returned to West Virginia, where she spent her teenage years. After two years at

Sweet Briar College Sweet Briar College is a private women's college in Sweet Briar, Virginia. It was established in 1901 by Indiana Fletcher Williams in memory of her deceased daughter, Daisy. The college formally opened its doors in 1906 and granted the B.A. deg ...

, she moved to New York City in pursuit of a career as an actress and model, and tested for the part of

Scarlett O'Hara Katie Scarlett O'Hara Hamilton Kennedy Butler is a fictional character and the protagonist in Margaret Mitchell's 1936 novel ''Gone with the Wind'' and in the 1939 film of the same name, where she is portrayed by Vivien Leigh. She also is the m ...

in '' Gone with the Wind''. She married the Englishman Rodney Weathersbee in 1939 and moved to England. "Like osephConrad, I was in exile for a long time." The couple had a son, Christopher Weatherbee. During

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

, she joined the British

Women's Auxiliary Air Force The Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF), whose members were referred to as WAAFs (), was the female auxiliary of the Royal Air Force during World War II. Established in 1939, WAAF numbers exceeded 180,000 at its peak strength in 1943, with over 2 ...

, and then the

Office of War Information The United States Office of War Information (OWI) was a United States government agency created during World War II. The OWI operated from June 1942 until September 1945. Through radio broadcasts, newspapers, posters, photographs, films and other ...

. She divorced her first husband in 1946 and married the Englishman Douglas Newton from whom she divorced in 1956. Upon returning to the US she started her writing career. She would later teach at Bard College, the

Iowa Writers' Workshop The Iowa Writers' Workshop, at the University of Iowa, is a celebrated graduate-level creative writing program in the United States. The writer Lan Samantha Chang is its director. Graduates earn a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree in Creative Wri ...

, and

University of Virginia The University of Virginia (UVA) is a Public university#United States, public research university in Charlottesville, Virginia. Founded in 1819 by Thomas Jefferson, the university is ranked among the top academic institutions in the United S ...

. She lived for many years in Canada, in England, and in Turkey. In 1978, when she was 60, she married William L. Tazewell, an American writer and historian. He died in 1998.

The Beulah Quintet

Settle wrote a wide variety of works, including non-fiction, but is most famous for a series of novels she called the Beulah Quintet. They cover the history of the development of people from seventeenth-century England to modern

West Virginia West Virginia is a state in the Appalachian, Mid-Atlantic and Southeastern regions of the United States.The Census Bureau and the Association of American Geographers classify West Virginia as part of the Southern United States while the Bur ...

: "In them she transferred the European tradition of a continuing fictional-historical saga to an American medium." The composition of the quintet was complicated; the novels are not of the same form, not in chronological sequence, and do not have common characters or issues between them. *''O Beulah Land'' (1956) * ''Know Nothing'' (1960) *''Prisons'' (1973), which is set earlier in time than ''O Beulah Land'' *''The Scapegoat'' (1980) and *''The Killing Ground'' (1982). This replaces ''Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday'', which Settle describes as her novel she most regrets

The PEN/ Faulkner awards

Settle founded in 1980 what is the United States's most prestigious and most lucrative prize for fiction: the PEN/Faulkner Awards, whose prize in 2005 was $15,000, . The acronym stands for poets, editors, and novelists, and Faulker is her hero, Southern novelist

William Faulkner William Cuthbert Faulkner (; September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962) was an American writer known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, based on Lafayette County, Mississippi, where Faulkner spent most of ...

. The winners are selected by other authors. Behind Settle's action is her experience as a member of the jury of the

in 1979, after being awarded its main prize the year before for ''

''.

Awards

In 1978 Settle won the

for her novel ''Blood Tie'', a novel set in Turkey. In 1983 she won the

Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize The Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize is a literary award presented annually for the "best book-length work of prose fiction" by an American woman. The award has been given by the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women's Studies and the Depar ...

for ''The Killing Ground'', the last volume of her series ''Beulah Quintet''.

Death

Settle died of lung cancer in a

hospice Hospice care is a type of health care that focuses on the palliation of a terminally ill patient's pain and symptoms and attending to their emotional and spiritual needs at the end of life. Hospice care prioritizes comfort and quality of life by ...

near

Charlottesville, Virginia Charlottesville, colloquially known as C'ville, is an independent city in the Commonwealth of Virginia. It is the county seat of Albemarle County, which surrounds the city, though the two are separate legal entities. It is named after Queen Ch ...

, on September 27, 2005, aged 87, while working on her last book, an imagined biography of Thomas Jefferson.

Works

Novels

''The Love Eaters''
(1954)
''The Kiss of Kin''
(1955). Her first novel, based on her unpublished play of the same name, which was accepted for publication only after the success of ''The Love Eaters''.
''O Beulah Land''
(1956) (First volume of what would be called the Beulah Quintet.
''Know Nothing''
(1960)
''Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday''
(1964)
''The Clam Shell''
(1970)
''Prisons''
(1973)
''Blood Tie
''">Blood Tie">''Blood Tie
''(1977). This novel, which received the

in 1978, deals with American and British expatriates in Turkey.
''The Scapegoat''
(1980)
''The Killing Grounds''
(1982) "To replace ''Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday'' as the final volume of the Beulah Quintet" (list of her books in ''Learning to Fly'').
''Celebration''
(1986)
''Charley Bland''
(1989). A widow of thirty-five returns to visit her parents in West Virginia and becomes involved in a love affair with the town's most eligible bachelor.
''Choices''
(1995). The life of a Southern belle who decided to work rather than play the debutante. The novel chronicles her adventures as a nurse during the bloody Kentucky miners strike and as an ambulance driver in the Spanish Civil War">Harlan County War">Kentucky miners strike and as an ambulance driver in the Spanish Civil War, through World War II, to her return to America in time to take part in the civil rights struggle.
''I, Roger Williams: A Novel''
(2002)

Memoirs

''All the Brave Promises: The Memories of Aircraft Woman 2nd Class 2146391''
(1966)
''Turkish Reflections: A Biography of Place''
(1991) *
''Addie: A Memoir''
(1998)
''Spanish Recognitions: The Road from the Past''
(2004) *

Other non-fiction

* *
''Water World''
(1994). On what is in and under the oceans.
''The Story of Flight''
(1967)

References

External links

by Brian O. Hogbin *
Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library
Emory University
Mary Lee Settle collection, circa 1985-1987
{{DEFAULTSORT:Settle, Mary Lee 1918 births 2005 deaths 20th-century American novelists 21st-century American novelists American women novelists National Book Award winners Writers from Charleston, West Virginia Sweet Briar College alumni Bard College faculty Iowa Writers' Workshop faculty University of Virginia faculty Deaths from lung cancer Deaths from cancer in Virginia 20th-century American women writers 21st-century American women writers Writers of American Southern literature PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction winners Novelists from Virginia Novelists from West Virginia Novelists from New York (state) Novelists from Iowa People of the United States Office of War Information American women civilians in World War II American women academics