[2] Growing up in the Appalachian Mountains of southwestern Virginia, nine-year-old Lee Smith was already writing—and selling, for a nickel apiece—stories about her neighbors in the coal boomtown of Grundy and the nearby isolated "hollers."
She and fellow student Annie Dillard (the well-known essayist and novelist) became go-go dancers for an all-girl rock band, the Virginia Woolfs.
In 1966, her senior year at Hollins, Smith submitted an early draft of a coming-of-age novel to a Book-of-the-Month Club contest and was awarded one of twelve fellowships.
In 1974 Smith and her family moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina,[1] where she finished Black Mountain Breakdown (1981), a much darker work than her readers had come to expect.
It was also about this time that her marriage broke up, and she accepted a teaching job at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, where she taught for many years.
In 1983 her fifth novel, Oral History, became a Book-of-the-Month Club featured selection, exposing Smith for the first time to a wide national audience.
[7] In April 2020, Smith published Blue Marlin, a novella that follows Jenny, an adventurous thirteen-year-old, down to Key West for a patched-up family vacation following the discovery of her father’s illicit affair.