NCSU Libraries Focus Online
Volume 21 number 2 - Winter 2001
Friends of the Library News: Lee Smith: A Diamond from Coal Country
By Mary Kate Keith, Friends of the Library
On October 19, 2000, the NCSU Libraries celebrated the career and writings
of Lee Smith, award-winning North Carolina author and retired NC State professor,
at a special reception and exhibit opening held in her honor. The exhibit,
mounted by the library's Special Collections Department and entitled A
Diamond from Coal Country: The Career of Lee Smith, features many items
from Smith's personal and professional papers, including unpublished short
stories. Items on display include the yellow, legal-sized sheets of Smith's
first story, handwritten as a young girl in 1956. The story, featuring Adlai
Stevenson and Jane Russell, has the main characters heading west in a covered
wagon to become Mormons. The exhibit is open to the public until January 31,
2001. A virtual exhibit may also be found at URL: http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/archives/exhibits/leesmith/.
Among those at the reception honoring Smith were fellow Hollins graduates
Wyndham Robertson, vice president of the Friends of the Library Board of Directors,
and Lucinda MacKethan, professor of English at NC State. In addition, Caroline
Weaver (Special Collections) gave an overview of the exhibit and insights into
Smith's career. She explained, "Lee Smith's papers encompass all stages
of her writing career and illustrate the process involved in the creation of
a book, beginning with Smith's handwritten notes and continuing through computer-generated
manuscripts to typeset proofs and suggested artwork for her novels. This process
is well documented for her popular and acclaimed novel Fair and Tender
Ladies. Materials in the collection related to Fair and Tender Ladies range
from notes on the novel, to maps of the region where Ivy Rowe lived, to handwritten
manuscripts and even adaptations of the novel as a play."
Following the reception at the D. H. Hill Library, guests were treated to
a wonderful production of Lee' s novel, Fair and Tender Ladies, in
the university's Stewart Theatre. The Alabama Shakespeare Festival performed
a musical version of the novel, which tells the life story of Ivy Rowe, a woman
from the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia in the early 1900s.
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