Mary Lee Settle

Mary Lee Settle (1918-2005) was an American novelist best known for her Beulah Quintet—O Beulah Land (1956), Know Nothing (1960), Prisons (1973), The Scapegoat (1980), and The Killing Ground (1982)—a series tracing history from 17th-century England to modern West Virginia, as well as Blood Tie (1977), which won the National Book Award in 1978. Center. She also received the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize in 1983 for The Killing Ground and founded the prestigious PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1980.