SOURCE: Buchanan, Harriette C. “Lee Smith: The Storyteller's Voice.” In Southern Women Writers: The New Generation, pp. 324-44. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1990.

In the following essay, Buchanan presents an overview of Lee Smith's career, praising her talent as a natural storyteller, her flexibility in handling point of view, and her mixing of the comic and the tragic in her works.

“What I'm trying to do all the time is just tell a story.”¹ So saying, Lee Smith modestly, or perhaps disingenuously, backs away from the complexity and richness of her narratives about life in the small-town South. Seen in context, that statement sheds light on the intentionality of her art: “I get really involved in the characters and the story, and it's hard for me to talk about whether I have any of what my [English] class calls the DHM, the Deep Hidden Meaning. What I'm...