Lee Smith is the author of eleven novels, including Oral History, Saving Grace, The Devil's Dream, and Fair and Tender Ladies, plus three collections of short stories. Her novel The Last Girls was a New York Times bestseller as well as a winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award. A retired professor of English at North Carolina State University, Lee received an Academy Award in Fiction from American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1999. Her new novel On Agate Hill was published in October 2006.