'You know, religion and flight, staying in one place or not staying, containment or flight-and religion.' From Lee Smith's official website. When she was 9 or 10, she wrote her first story, about Adlai Stevenson and Jane Russell heading out west together to become Mormons-and embodying the very same themes, Smith says, that concern her even today. Smith describes herself as a 'deeply weird' child. I mean, my mother could make a story out of anything she'd go to the grocery store and come home with a story.'

My Uncle Vern, who was in the legislature, was a famous storyteller, as were others, including my dad.

'I didn't know any writers,' Smith says, ' I grew up in the midst of people just talking and talking and talking and telling these stories. Through a peephole in the ceiling of the store, Smith would watch and listen to the shoppers, paying close attention to the details of how they talked and dressed and what they said. And it was in that store that Smith's training as a writer began. Her father, Ernest, a native of the area, operated a dime store. Her mother, Virginia, was a college graduate who had come to Grundy to teach school.

The Smith home sat on Main Street, and the Levisa River ran just behind it. Lee Smith was born in 1944 in Grundy, Virginia, a small coal-mining town in the Blue Ridge Mountains, not 10 miles from the Kentucky border. The sense of place infusing her novels reveals her insight into and empathy for the people and culture of Appalachia. This is a novel deserving of unique praise. Growing up in the Appalachian mountains of southwestern Virginia, nine-year-old Lee Smith was already writing-and selling, for a nickel apiece-stories about her neighbors in the coal boomtown of Grundy and the nearby isolated 'hollers.' Since 1968, she has published eleven novels, as well as three collections of short stories, and has received many writing awards. You could employ all those familiar ringing terms of praise: 'rare,' 'brilliant,' 'unforgettable.' But Lee Smith and Oral History make you wish that all those phrases were fresh and new, that all those comparisons had never before been made.

Oral history lee smith sparknotes