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Mary Lee Settle's memoir 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 the effect on her family and herself of ancient 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.
She tells of her own birth on the day of the worst casualties of World War I, when her mother was obsessed with fear for a beloved brother stationed in France; of growing up in a time of boom and bust; of the Great Depression; of clinging to a frail raft of gentility that formed her early adolescence. She traces dreams from the attic of a music school where she found a friend who took her to Shakespeare and a teacher who forced her to recognize true pitch.
Addie ends back at its source, in the Kanawha Valley, with those, now dead, who helped to form the author's life. The memoir closes with the burial of the last of the inheritors of Beulah, Settle's cousin, to whom Addie is dedicated.
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Previews available in: English
Subjects
American Novelists, Biography, Family, Family relationships, Grandmothers, History, Novelists, American, American Women novelists, Settle, Mary Lee -- Family, Families, Novelists, American -- 20th century -- Family relationships, Grandmothers -- West Virginia -- Biography, Family -- West Virginia -- History, Authors, biography, Women authors, Grandparents, West virginia, biography, Family, united statesPeople
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First Sentence
"In 1927, when the Florida boom burst, we went home in a Model T Ford with what was left packed in orange crates tied to the running boards."
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Feedback?July 15, 2024 | Edited by MARC Bot | import existing book |
December 29, 2021 | Edited by ImportBot | import existing book |
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