In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

FEATURED AUTHOR—LEE SMITH Reunions Shannon Ravenel Lee Smith and I are kin to each otherby way of our intellectual godfather, Louis D. Rubin, Jr. He was my major professor and advisor at Hollins College (now Hollins University) and seven years later, he was Lee's. Both of us will tell you that the term, "advisor," understates Mr. Rubin's support ofhis students. In my case, he opened my eyes to the possibility of a career in publishing and effectively led me to publishers' doors in New York. In Lee's case, he validated her recognition of the career she wanted and led her to publishers' doors as well. In fact, he led her to my door in 1967. That was the year Lee graduated from Hollins and the year I was beginning to acquire writers for Houghton Mifflin Co. At Louis's suggestion, Lee sent me the manuscript of her senior thesis, a novel titled The Last Day The Dog Bushes Bloomed. To my eternal shame and regret, I rejected the novel. But Lee tells people that I rejected it with a long letter outlining my criticisms, which she says, with her inimitable generosity, she used to revise it. I hope I really did what she says I did. In any case, The Last Day The Dog Bushes Bloomed won the Book- of-the-Month Club Writing Fellowship Contest and was published in 1968—her first year out of college—by Harper & Row. Kirkus Reviews said this: "Since To Kill A Mockingbird, this is the most imaginative limning to date of childhood's boundaries and inevitable incursions...An immaculately styled first novel." I didn't get a chance to redeem myself until 28 years later when Lee and I both would up living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and Lee published a short story called "The Christmas Letters" in Redbook. That was in 1995, by which time Louis Rubin had opened his own publishing house doors, invited me to join him, and then left me to run the editorial side of it when he resigned as Algonquin's Publisher in 1991. It occurred to Lee and me that her short story mightbe expanded into a short novel that could be a great Christmas gift book. G. P. Putnam & Son, her regular publisher then, let her come to us for this one special little book. The Christmas Letters, published in the Fall of 1996 just in time for Christmas, was a big hit and everybody at Algonquin involved with its publication—especially me—had a wonderful time working to bring it out and to bring readers to it. In 24 the process, we discovered that Lee Smith is as a professional writer exactly as she is as a person—brilliant, creative, energetic, positive, willing, giving, and full of fun. And so, when Lee's agent, Liz Darhansoff, brought the manuscript of her eleventh novel, The Last Girls, to Algonquin in 2001, 1 knew I was the luckiest fiction editor in America—to have turned down her first novel and then be given the opportunity to work with her on a major book was beyond what I could have hoped. The whole house was excited and energized as we geared up to publish Lee Smith as she deserves—trumpets blaring and champagne corks popping. And the book itself is such a book. Revered for her powerful female characters, Lee dipped into her own experiences at Hollins when she and a dozen classmates in Louis Rubin's American Literature course built a raft to recreate Huck Finn's trip down the Mississippi. In the novel, four of those "girls" reunite thirty-five years later to cruise the river again. The Last Girls has everything a reader could want. As Robert Inman said in his review for The Boston Globe, "The rich and delicious stuff of Smith's narrative are the extended flashbacks to the women's college days...[her] genius is in her seamless weaving of the two stories, past and present, so that we realize what the stakes are for these women, and how they have arrived at the reunion as footsore pilgrims—a bit battered and bruised, but sailing on nevertheless. . .Lee...

pdf

Share