Black Mountain Breakdown

Lee Smith makes you dizzy to smell freshly cut grass on a summer night. She lets you feel the bumps in the mountain road, and she plain drags you willingly, eagerly into the life and language of this Southern mountain town.” —Atlanta Journal and Constitution

Black Mountain Breakdown (1981) is Lee Smith’s first novel set in the mountains of Appalachia–in Black Rock, a fictional coal-mining town very much like Grundy. It is the story of Crystal Spengler’s fall from innocence, as well as an object lesson in the perils of passivity–a turn of disposition, Smith says, to which many Southern women are particularly susceptible.

The novel traces the arc of Crystal’s evolution from a romantic, daydreaming girl of 12 to an hysterically catatonic woman of 32. Black Mountain Breakdown is not only a much darker book than Smith’s previous novels, but also a more mature novel.

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