Two years before her death in 2005, Mary Lee Settle sat down "to trace the way that led me into the writer I have been for fifty years." The result is this memoir, which picks up her life story where Addie (1998) left it, with a girl turning twenty, head over heels in love with the language of Shakespeare and determined to be an actress. That summer of 1938 her mother sends Mary Lee off to a theater apprenticeship, inadvertently setting her on a road few women of that era would have dared to travel. The road will lead to serious, "uncompromised" writing and over twenty books, including her...

In this beautiful and feelingly written book, Mary Lee Settle tells the story of Roger Williams: the most compelling figure in colonial America. Plucked from obscurity to clerk for the celebrated English jurist Sir Edward Coke, Williams had a ringside seat on the brutal politics of Jacobean London. He was witness to the pomp of the Star Chamber; the burning of a dissenter; and the humiliation of his master by King James and the royal favorite, the dangerously beautiful Buckingham. Haunted by ambition and love for a woman above his station, he fled to New England, where repression and...

At eighty-two years old, Mary Lee Settle set off alone to find the Spain she thought she knew. But, like Columbus on another voyage of discovery, she found something--many things--that she hadn't even known she was looking for. Winner of a National Book Award for fiction and author of an acclaimed book of travel and history on Turkey, Settle brings to her task the visual equivalent of perfect pitch. She follows the great, traumatic flows in Spanish history: the Moorish conquest from south to north, and the Christian reconquista several hundred years later in the opposite direction. Those epic...

The story of the Pony Express, which carried transcontinental mail from April 3, 1860 to October 24, 1861, is one of the most invigorating and satisfying episodes in American history. Saddles and Spurs: The Pony Express Saga brings together a storehouse of information about this brilliant operation. Projected against an account of the historical background-the great overland mail issue, the freighting and the stagecoach business, the development of the telegraph and the Pacific railroad-is the narrative of the Pony Express's organization and the laying out of its route; biographical sketches...

One of Mary Lee Settle's richest and most compassionate novels, Celebration chronicles the love affair of a widowed American anthropologist and a Scottish geologist who meet in the British Museum. Set in 1969, the novel also tells the intertwining tales of the couple's diverse cast of friends - a gay English aristocrat and his Hong Kong love, a gargantuan Dinka Jesuit, a sexually subversive editor, a former colonial civil servant, and, as comic relief, an unwitting FBI agent. Despite the fact that these characters live in the most murderous of centuries and that many of them have encountered...

The novel that launched Settle's outstanding career, The Love Eaters is an acid satire of bedroom and community tragedy. A wealthy, small-town theatrical group finds itself at the direction of a wheelchair-bound man whose designs extend beyond the stage. As he begins to lose control, so do his players, revealing appetites they scarcely knew that had. The Kiss of Kin, Settle's second and highly acclaimed novel, centers on the funeral, and last testament of Anna Mary Passmore. Drawn back to the Soutern homeplace, members of the Passmore clan-all of whom nurse visions that the matriarch's...

"A work of truth and beauty -- beautifully written, beautiful to read". -- George Garrett

Before the Civil War, Peregrine Catlett considers freeing his slaves but believes he can only retain his plantation by slave labour. His son, Johnny, returns to his father's farm but stays only until the outbreak of hostilities. He ends up fighting family and friends with disastrous consequences.

Set in 1912, The Scapegoat propels readers towards a fateful day in a coal miners' strike when distant relatives of the Beulah dynasty, only dimly aware of their blood ties, face off in a dispute that escalates into a frenzy of violence and ends in the slaughter of an innocent man.

In this moving and brilliant narrative of doomed love, Mary Lee Settle tells a triangular affair set in the small town of Canona, West Virginia. The novel's narrator, a thirty-five-year-old widow and writer, returns from a self-imposed European exile to find her hometown much as she left it decades ago. One thing does change upon her arrival, however; she takes Charley Bland, Canona's most eligible bachelor and the object of her schoolgirl crush, as her lover. The third person in the profane trinity is Charley's doting mother, a woman who believes no female worthy of her son. Mrs. Bland...