Ли Смит: Жизнь и творчество американской писательницы

American fiction author (born 1944)

Lee Smith (born November 1, 1944) is an American fiction writer who often incorporates her background from the American South in her works. She has received many writing awards, such as the O. Henry Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction, and the North Carolina Award for Literature. Her novel The Last Girls was listed on the New York Times bestseller's list and won the Southern Book Critics Circle Award.

Smith was born in 1944 in Grundy, Virginia, a small coal mining town in the Appalachian Mountains, less than 10 miles from the Kentucky border. The Smith home sat on Main Street, and the Levisa Fork River ran just behind it. Her mother, Virginia Elizabeth née Marshall, known as "Gig", was a college graduate who taught school. Her father, Ernest Lee Smith, was the owner and operator of a Ben Franklin store in Grundy. 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." After spending her last two years of high school at St. Catherine's School in Richmond, Virginia, Smith enrolled at Hollins College in Roanoke. She and fellow student Annie Dillard (the well known essayist and novelist) became go go dancers for an all girl rock band, the Virginia Woolfs. In 1966, her senior year at Hollins, Smith submitted an early draft of a coming of age novel to a Book of the Month Club contest and was awarded one of twelve fellowships. Two years later, that novel, The Last Day the Dog Bushes Bloomed (Harper & Row, 1968), became Smith's first published work of fiction. Since 1968, she has published fifteen novels, as well as four collections of short stories, and has received many writing awards. Her memoir Dimestore: A Writer’s Life published in 2016 and constructed as a series of personal essays, is the story of her life in Grundy and beyond.