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

MARY LEE SETTLE The founder ofthe PEN-Faulkner Award, Mary Lee Settle (b. 1918) grew up in Charleston , West Virginia, and attended Sweet Briar College. She enlisted in World War II as an aircraft woman in the RAF, an experience she recounts in All the Brave Promises (1966). Mter the war, she returned to New York Ciry, working briefly as an assistant editor at Harper's before deciding to devote herself to writing. She is best known as the author of the Beulah Quintet, five novels that trace America's roots from Cromwellian England to twentieth-century West Virgina. 0 Beulah Land (1956), the first novel of the quintet to be written but the second in the story's chronology, reflects the many years she spent researching the history of her West Virginia roots in the British Museum . Blood Tie (1977), a novel set in Turkey, where Settle lived from 1972 to 1974, won the National Book Award for fiction in 1978. In 1989 she returned to Turkey, telling this story in Turkish Reflections: A Biography ofa Place (I 99 I). Settle's most recent fiction includes Celebration (I 986), Charley Bland (I 989), and Choices (I995). She has taught creative writing at Bard College, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and the Universiry of Virginia. Her numerous awards in addition to the National Book Award include Guggenheim Fellowships, a Merrill Foundation Award, the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize in fiction by an American woman for The Killing Ground (1983), and the Lillian Smith Award for Choices. She currently lives in Charlottesville with her husband , columnist and historian William Littleton Tazewell. The first volume of her memoir, Addie, will be published by the Universiry ofSouth Carolina Press as a part of the Mary Lee Settle Collection. * * * The Search for the Beulah Quintet In 1953, I began a third novel-O Beulah Land-before the first two had been published. It grew from a questioned image. A man hit a stranger in a drunk tank on a hot, summer night in a small town in the Alleghenies. The image was modern . "Why?" was the question about one act ofviolence that would draw me away from the present-how far back I had no idea then. I began to learn a past and a language. I found fears, dreams, and hatreds that once had reason, frozen into prejudice. I began to see people at the time of these reasons, these hopes, these illusions. I found not only what was happening but what they thought was happening , a change and flow ofbelief that reflected the time as a mirror. The search would grow into a quintet I never intended. It would take twenty-eight years to finish. The five volumes cover over three hundred years. oBeulah Landbegins with the image ofa woman stripped down to survival, lost and mindless with fear, moving toward the east through the Endless Mountains , now called the Alleghenies. Her name is Hannah Bridewell. The time is 1754. She glimpses and remembers a small valley, the first sight of Beulah. Hunger for land ofone's own, safe from exile, is the guiding force ofthe time. The land would be always a little farther west, a little out ofreach, over the next mountain, down the next river. I did not have the luxury oflooking back on the years of0 Beulah Landfrom the present with all the arrogance and future knowledge ofa past time. That is the privilege ofhistorians. I had to become contemporary, think as they thought, fear what they had feared, use their own language with its yet unchanged meanings, face a blank and fearful future. I had to forget what I already knew. I was living in England, far, I thought, from the place and time I sought. I was wrong. I went to the British Museum, and there, all around the walls, in the huge catalogues that had been kept so carefully for so long, I found an Aladdin's cave ofmemory. The eighteenth-century Gentlemen's Magazine was in the shelves near my favorite seat in the great round reading room. I began with that. In the back ofeach issue were the book reviews. They were my first source, long-forgotten books about the new, feared, fascinating land ofVirginia, which was a generic name for a wild place beyond a terrifYing sea. They were all there, still in the stacks-the books about battles, about discoveries, about laws, about captivities, told by the people who had experienced them, in...

Share