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An autobiography that begins with one's birth begins too late, in the middle of the story, sometimes at the end. So begins Mary Lee Settle's memoir. Her story carries within it inherited choices, old habits, old quarrels, old disguises, and the river that formed the Kanawha Valley of West Virginia and the mores of her childhood. She traces effects on her family and herself as ancient as earthquakes, mountain formations, and the crushing of swamp into coal deposits. In doing so, Settle records the expectations, talents, and tragedies of a people and a place that would serve as her deep and abiding subject in The Beulah Quintet.
Settle has done a remarkable job of capturing the culture that is, in a sense, the most important character in her book. -- New York Times
During the English Civil War a young man joins Cromwell's Parliamentary Army to escape his humorless father only to find betrayal and tragedy in Ireland. Based on a true incident.
The author recounts her experiences living in Turkey for three years, and shares her observations on Turkish history, people, and culture.
O Beulah Land, the second volume of The Beulah Quintet—Mary Lee Settle's unforgettable generational saga about the roots of American culture, class, and identity and the meaning of freedom—is a land-hungry story. It follows the odyssey of Johnny Church's descendants as they leave England in search of freedom and land. One of those descendants, Jonathan Lacey, settles in the backcountry of Virginia, where he battles both Native Americans and white frontier bandits and builds the beginning of a flourishing estate named Beulah. The novel closes shortly before the commencement of the Revolutionary War, with Lacey elected to the House of Burgesses and his family line firmly established in what is to become the state of West Virginia.
A literary testament showing how Mary Lee Settle's great novels followed the map of her remarkable life. 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 masterwork, The Beulah Quintet. The adventures along the way—from the glamour of New York during the World's Fair, through the terrors of London during the Blitz, to the trials and triumphs of the postwar literary world—will delight, inform, and alarm the reader of this thoroughly modern Canterbury Tale.
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.
In this narrative of doomed love, Mary Lee Settle tells of a triangular affair set in the small town of Canona, West Virginia, revealing the mores of Canona's closed, upper-class society and of its less prosperous underculture.
Banished by his fellow colonists in the dead of winter, Roger Williams endured years of exile among the Narragansett Indians and narrates this tumultuous tale in the peaceful last years of his life. In this panorama of war and love, the reader finds the freedom of conscience is an idea worth dying for. A "Los Angeles Times" Best Book of 2001.