Mary Lee Settle, who spent much of her childhood in Pineville, Kentucky, wrote 23 books, including 15 novels. Her novel Blood Tie won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1978. Two years later, she founded the annual PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
Settle became widely known for the five historical novels that formed her Beulah Quintet: O Beulah Land (1956); Know Nothing (1960); Prisons (1973); The Scapegoat (1980); and The Killing Ground (1982). The novels span four centuries, from Cromwell’s England to 1980s West Virginia, and took her more than a quarter-century to research and write.
She was born in Charleston, West Virginia, on July 29, 1918 to Joseph Edward and Rachel Tompkins Settle. An engineer in the Appalachian coal industry, he moved the family to Florida for a time in hopes of cashing in on the 1920s land boom.
Settle went to Sweet Briar College in Virginia for two years before moving to New York to pursue a career as a model and actress. She moved to England after marrying Englishman Rodney Weathersbee in 1939. Early in the Second World War, she volunteered for Britain’s Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and wrote a 1966 memoir about it, All the Brave Promises.
She and Weathersbee had a son, Christopher, and divorced in 1946. She married Douglas Newton that year and they divorced a decade later. She was married to William Tazewell from 1978 until his death in 1998.
Settle’s first book, The Love Eaters (1954), was published in Britain to critical praise, but she struggled professionally afterward. She moved back to New York and worked in magazines before publishing O Beulah Land (1956).
She wrote journalism from Vietnam in 1967 and 1968 for Esquire magazine. As a lifelong liberal Democrat, she swore that if Richard Nixon was elected president she would leave the United States. She returned to England in 1969 and then moved to Turkey, where she lived until 1974. Her novel Blood Tie was about British and American expatriates there.
After returning to this country, Settle taught at Bard College, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of Virginia. She was admired for her meticulous research and realistic dialogue.
Settle never stopped writing. She wrote and published two books in her 80s: Spanish Recognitions, about her travels across Spain, and I, Roger Williams, a novel based on the life of the founder of Rhode Island. She died at age 87 on Sept. 27, 2005 in Charlottesville, Virginia, while working on an imagined biography of Thomas Jefferson.
Novels
The Love Eaters (1954)
The Kiss of Kin (1955).
O Beulah Land (1956)
Know Nothing (1960)
Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday (1964)
The Clam Shell (1970)
Prisons (1973)
Blood Tie (1977)
The Scapegoat (1980)
The Killing Grounds (1982)
Celebration (1986)
Charley Bland (1989)
Choices (1995)
I, Roger Williams (2002)
Memoir and Nonfiction
Yankee Doodle Dandy (1950)
All the Brave Promises (1966)
The Story of Flight (1967)
The Scopes Trial (1972)
Turkish Reflections (1991)
Water World (1994)
Addie: A Memoir (1998)
Spanish Recognitions (2004)
Learning to Fly: A Writer’s Memoir (2007)
Major Awards
National Book Award (1978)
Janet Heldinger Kafka Prize (1983)
