An American critic, editor, and journalist. Smith is the author of Real Life Drama: The Group Theatre and America, 1931-1940 (1990). In the following review, she provides a highly favorable assessment of Pigs in Heaven.

There is no one quite like Barbara Kingsolver in contemporary literature. She writes about working-class lives with an exhilarating combination of grit and joy that only Lee Smith among her peers can match, and Smith's work is more firmly rooted in a specific region (Appalachia), while Kingsolver engages the whole of American culture in novels and short fiction—The Bean Trees, Homeland and Other Stories, Animal Dreams—that sympathetically explore the worlds of people from many different backgrounds. She is the equal of any bestselling author in her gift for engaging, accessible storytelling, and she illuminates her themes through imagery woven into her plots with a technical aplomb that would delight any English...