Mary Lee Settle
Mary Lee Settle, who spent much of her childhood in Pineville, 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.
Settle was born in Charleston, West Virginia, on July 29, 1918, to Joseph Edward and Rachel Tompkins Settle. An engineer in the Appalachian coal industry, Joseph 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 World War II, she volunteered for Britain’s Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and wrote a 1966 memoir, All the Brave Promises, about the experience.
She and Weathersbee had a son, Christopher; they 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 for Esquire magazine from Vietnam in 1967 and ’68. A lifelong liberal Democrat, Settle 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 at the University of Iowa, 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.