Mary Lee Settle
After two years at Sweet Briar College, she moved to New York City in pursuit of a career as an actress and model, and tested for the part of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind.[7] Settle wrote a wide variety of works, including non-fiction, but is most famous for a series of novels she called the Beulah Quintet.They cover the history of the development of people from seventeenth-century England to modern West Virginia:[4][7] "In them she transferred the European tradition of a continuing fictional-historical saga to an American medium.[7] In 1983 she won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for The Killing Ground, the last volume of her series Beulah Quintet."[10] Settle died of lung cancer in a hospice near Charlottesville, Virginia, on September 27, 2005, aged 87, while working on her last book, an imagined biography of Thomas Jefferson.