Learning to Fly: A Writer's Memoir

A literary testament showing how Mary Lee Settle's great novels followed the map of her remarkable life.

Two years before her death in 2005, Mary Lee Settle sat down "to trace the way that led me into the writer I have been for fifty years." The result is this memoir, which picks up her life story where Addie (1998) left it, with a girl turning twenty, head over heels in love with the language of Shakespeare and determined to be an actress. That summer of 1938 her mother sends Mary Lee off to a theater apprenticeship, inadvertently setting her on a road few women of that era would have dared to travel.

The road will lead to serious, "uncompromised" writing and over twenty books, including her masterwork, The Beulah Quintet. The adventures along the way—from the glamour of New York during the World's Fair, through the terrors of London during the Blitz, to the trials and triumphs of the postwar literary world—will delight, inform, and alarm the reader of this thoroughly modern Canterbury Tale.