Mary Lee Settle

July 29, 1918 — September 27, 2005 — Charleston, West Virginia, United States

Mary Lee Settle was an American novelist celebrated for her sweeping historical fiction, most notably the five-volume Beulah Quintet chronicling centuries of West Virginia history. She won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1978 for Blood Tie, and later founded the PEN/Faulkner Award to honor excellence in American fiction. Her career spanned decades and continents, shaped by wartime service, personal reinvention, and a deep commitment to historical accuracy in storytelling.

Early Life and Formative Years

Mary Lee Settle was born on July 29, 1918, in Charleston, West Virginia, into a family with deep roots in the Appalachian region that would later become the setting for much of her fiction. She briefly attended Sweet Briar College in Virginia but left before completing her degree, drawn instead toward a more unconventional path. In her early twenties, she worked as a model and actress, experiences that exposed her to a wider world beyond the hills of West Virginia. When World War II erupted, Settle volunteered for service with the Women's Auxiliary Air Force in Britain, an experience that profoundly shaped her worldview and gave her firsthand exposure to the upheavals of history. This period of service, along with her subsequent work for the Office of War Information, immersed her in the kind of large-scale historical forces that would become the central preoccupation of her literary career. These early years of travel, service, and reinvention gave Settle the material and perspective she would later transform into richly detailed historical narratives.

Literary Career and the Beulah Quintet

Settle's most enduring achievement is the Beulah Quintet, a monumental cycle of five novels tracing the history of a fictionalized West Virginia region from the 17th-century English Civil War era through the 20th century. The sequence—including O Beulah Land, Know Nothing, Prisons, The Scapegoat, and The Killing Ground—demonstrated her extraordinary command of historical detail and her ability to connect personal lives to sweeping social change. In 1978, Settle won the National Book Award for Fiction for Blood Tie, a novel set in Turkey that showcased her range beyond Appalachian settings. Her prose was known for its precision, moral seriousness, and refusal to romanticize the past, distinguishing her from more sentimental regional writers. Beyond her own novels, Settle left a lasting institutional legacy: frustrated by what she saw as the limitations of existing literary prizes, she founded the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1980, an honor determined by writers themselves that has since become one of the most respected awards in American letters.

Later Life and Legacy

In her later decades, Settle continued to write prolifically, producing memoirs, essays, and additional novels while also teaching and mentoring younger writers. She held academic positions, including a notable stint at the University of Virginia, where she helped nurture a new generation of American fiction writers. Her contributions to literature were recognized with numerous honors throughout her career, cementing her reputation as one of the most serious and historically minded American novelists of her generation. Mary Lee Settle died on September 27, 2005, in Ivy, Virginia, near Charlottesville, leaving behind a body of work admired for its intellectual rigor and its unflinching engagement with history. Her founding of the PEN/Faulkner Award remains one of her most tangible legacies, ensuring that her influence on American literature extends well beyond her own novels. Today, she is remembered both as a masterful chronicler of Appalachian history and as an institutional force who reshaped how American fiction writers are recognized and celebrated.