Billie Letts, ‘Where the Heart Is’ Novelist, Dies at 76
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Billie Letts, a late-blooming writer whose debut novel, “Where the Heart Is,” became a best seller after Oprah Winfrey endorsed it in 1998 and was the inspiration for a Hollywood film, died on Saturday at a hospital near her home in Tulsa, Okla. She was 76.
Her son the playwright Tracy Letts, the author of “August: Osage County,” said the cause was pneumonia. Ms. Letts recently learned she had acute myeloid leukemia.
Ms. Letts was in her 50s and had been teaching college English for more than two decades while writing in her spare time with little success when her fortunes began to change.
“I was still dreaming of becoming a ‘real’ writer, a writer with my name in the credits of a movie or on the cover of a book,” she wrote in an afterword to a paperback version of “Where the Heart Is.”
In a chance encounter at a writers’ conference, an agent encouraged her to develop one of her stories — about a pregnant teenager who is abandoned by her boyfriend at a Wal-Mart and then hides out there for months until she gives birth — into a novel. She did, and the novel, “Where the Heart Is,” was published in 1995 by Grand Central Publishing.
The book received mixed notices. “Ms. Letts unspools this lightweight story with a fair amount of charm, and for a while ‘Where the Heart Is’ reads like a Fannie Flagg novel freshened up by Molly Ivins,”Dwight Garner wrote in The New York Times.
But Ms. Winfrey loved it and called Ms. Letts to tell her that she wanted to feature the novel on the book club segment of her hugely popular television show. An endorsement by Ms. Winfrey is one of the most coveted in the publishing world for the sales it can generate. Soon “Where the Heart Is,” which had already come out in paperback, had climbed to the top of The Times’s paperback best-seller list. It has sold more than three million copies worldwide.
It stayed on the list until well after thefilm version was released in April 2000. The movie starred Natalie Portman and Ashley Judd and featured Ms. Letts’s husband, Dennis, who had become a full-time actor after he retired from teaching.
Billie Dean Gipson was born to Bill and Virginia Gipson in Tulsa on May 30, 1938. Her father, a laborer who later ran an air-conditioning business, committed suicide. “I think Mom was always more interested in telling stories of working-class people,” Tracy Letts said in an interview on Monday.
She married Dennis Letts in 1958. She earned a bachelor’s degree in English and education from Southeast Missouri State University and a master’s in behavioral studies from Southeastern Oklahoma State University. She began teaching English in grade school before doing so at the college level. She and her husband both taught the subject for many years at Southeastern Oklahoma.
Dennis Letts died in 2008, shortly after appearing on Broadway as the patriarch of an Oklahoma family in “August: Osage County,” which won a Pulitzer Prize.
In addition to her son Tracy, Ms. Letts is survived by her sons Shawn and Dana.
She published three more novels, including “The Honk and Holler Opening Soon” (1998) and “Shoot the Moon” (2004).
Ms. Winfrey’s book club segment was usually shot as a lavish-dinner-party discussion involving Ms. Winfrey, the author and several readers. But for “Where the Heart Is,” Ms. Winfrey chose a simpler but perhaps more appropriate setting.
“My dinner party,” Ms. Letts wrote in an article on the websitereadersread.com, “was held in the snack bar of a Wal-Mart just outside Chicago.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/05/arts/billie-letts-where-the-heart-is-novelist-dies-at-76.html?_r=0
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