The Devil's Dream

New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1992. First edition. First printing [stated]. Hardcover. Very good/very good. 315, [5] pages. Notes. Genealogoy table on endpapers. Signed by author. Long inscription on title page signed by the author. Lee Smith is the author of Fair and Tender Ladies. From the author's official website: Lee Smith has published 12 novels and four collections of short stories. She is a recipient of the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the North Carolina Award for Literature, and a Southern Book Critics Circle Award. In 2010, she published a collection of new and selected stories named Mrs. Darcy and the Blue Eyed Stranger and also received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the State Library of Virginia. A sweeping saga about the world of country music by Lee Smith, "a Southern storyteller in the very best tradition [who], like the best of storytellers, knows how to get out of the way so the story can tell itself". --San Francisco Chronicle. In 1990 Lee Smith won the Lyndhurst Prize to study country music, and her research resulted in The Devil's Dream (1992), yet another multi-generational family saga. The story of the musical Bailey family (loosely based, Smith says, on the legendary Carter family), it plumbs nearly a century's worth of history to tell the story of the family's most successful descendant, Katie Cocker, whose career flourishes once she hits Nashville.But The Devil's Dream is really concerned with the problem of success, which, for Katie--as well as for other country musicians and perhaps for all of us--carries within it the genesis of failure. "What you want, of course, is to be successful," Smith says. "You're always singing of home, but you're never home. And there's something about that--I think I feel like that about a lot of things, this intense ambivalence."