Lee Smith
Author of On Agate Hill
Lee Smith is the author of twelve novels, including Oral History, Saving Grace, The Devil's Dream, Fair and Tender Ladies, and On Agate Hill plus three collections of short stories. Her novel The Last Girls was a New York Times bestseller as well as a winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award.
A retired professor of English at North Carolina State University, Lee received an Academy Award in Fiction from American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1999. Her new collection, Mrs. Darcy and the Blue Eyed Stranger, was published in March, 2010. On Agate Hill has been chosen for Western North Carolina's "Together We Read" program involving 22 counties... Check out Alice Gerrard's "The Road to Agate Hill" CD... Click Here for information on Barbara Bates Smith's new one-woman show On Agate Hill. Read the review or check out her schedule.
The story takes place on Agate Hill, N.C., 1872. On her thirteenth birthday, orphan girl Molly Petree peeps out the chink of a window from her secret hiding place up in the eaves of a tumbledown old plantation house to survey a world gone wild. “I know I am a spitfire and a burden,” she begins her diary. “I do not care. For evil or good this is my own true life and I WILL have it. I will.” She keeps the diary in her treasured “box of phenomena” which contains “letters, poems, songs, court records, marbles, rocks, dolls, and bones, some human” by the time it is found during a historic renovation project in 2003. These items tell the story of Molly’s passionate journey through life.—>
