Mary Lee Settle | |
|---|---|
 Mary Lee Settle | |
| Born | (1918-07-29)July 29, 1918 Charleston, West Virginia, U.S. |
| Died | September 27, 2005(2005-09-27) (aged 87) Ivy, Virginia, U.S. |
| Occupation | Author |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Sweet Briar College |
| Spouses | |
Mary Lee Settle (July 29, 1918 – September 27, 2005) was an American writer.[1]
She won the 1978National Book Award for her novelBlood Tie.[2] She was a founder of the annualPEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.[3]
Settle was born inCharleston, West Virginia, the daughter of Joseph Edward and Rachel Tompkins Settle.[4] According to one report her father was a civil engineer in charge of worker safety at coal mines.[4] According to another he owned a coal mine in Kentucky;[5] Mary spent her childhood inPineville, Kentucky, interrupted by a period in Florida when her father, drawn by theFlorida land rush, participated in the design ofVenice, Florida.[5] Her family returned to West Virginia, where she spent her teenage years. After two years atSweet Briar College, she moved to New York City in pursuit of a career as an actress and model, and tested for the part ofScarlett O'Hara inGone with the Wind.[6]
She married the Englishman Rodney Weathersbee in 1939 and moved to England. The couple had a son, Christopher Weatherbee. DuringWorld War II, she joined the BritishWomen's Auxiliary Air Force, and then theOffice of War Information. She divorced her first husband in 1946 and married the Englishman Douglas Newton from whom she divorced in 1956.[6]
Upon returning to the US she started her writing career. She would later teach atBard College, theIowa Writers' Workshop, andUniversity of Virginia.[5]
She lived for many years in Canada, in England, and in Turkey.[6]
In 1978, when she was 60, she married William L. Tazewell, an American writer and historian. He died in 1998.[7]
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 modernWest Virginia:[4][7] "In them she transferred the European tradition of a continuing fictional-historical saga to an American medium."[8]
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.
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, equivalent to $24,150 in 2024. The acronym stands for 'Poets,Editors, andNovelists' and 'Faulkner' is for her hero, Southern novelistWilliam Faulkner. The winners are selected by other authors.[4]
Behind Settle's action is her experience as a member of the jury of theNational Book Award in 1979, after being awarded its main prize the year before forBlood Tie.
In 1978 Settle won theNational Book Award for her novelBlood Tie, a novel set in Turkey.[7]
In 1983 she won theJanet Heidinger Kafka Prize forThe Killing Ground, the last volume of her seriesBeulah Quintet.[9]
Brian Rosenberg remarked of the critical response to her work: "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."[10]
Settle died of lung cancer in ahospice nearCharlottesville, Virginia, on September 27, 2005, aged 87, while working on her last book, an imagined biography of Thomas Jefferson.[4]
