Lee Smith’s body of work examines the influence of significant factors–such as place, memory, art, tradition, social expectation, media, religion, history, and story–on personal identity. Enriching her treatment of the subject, she explores this issue always with a consciousness of the self’s ultimate indeterminable. In twelve novels, Smith draws us into a rigorous exploration of the self, the location and essence of which are often sought in a landscape of shifting and imagined markers. “I have been so many people”: A Study of Lee Smith’s Novels examines Smith’s novels, exploring the social commentary within in a manner that any reader can understand.

Tanya Long Bennett is a professor of English at the University of North Georgia, where she has taught for thirteen years. She earned her Ph.D. in English at the University of Tennessee. Her research focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction, as well as gender studies.