Mary Lee Settle

Portrait photo of Mary Lee Settle. Reproduced from Wikimedia Commons.

Mary Lee Settle (July 29, 1918 – September 27, 2005) was a famous American writer of the twentieth century who lived in Charlottesville throughout much of her later life, teaching courses at the University of Virginia. She served in the British Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) as well as the United States Office of War Information (OWI) during World War II and, in 1980, founded the PEN/Faulkner Awards, which at the time was the United States's most prestigious and most lucrative prize for fiction. Settle died of lung cancer at a hospice in Ivy at the age of 87 while working on her last book, an imagined biography of Thomas Jefferson.