After being rejected by the American armed forces for poor eyesight, Mary Lee Settle volunteered for service in the women's auxiliary arm of the Royal Air Force in 1942. She was a lone young American in a barracks full of English women. All the Brave Promises is her recollection and evocation of those war years.

Mary Lee Settle's major work is The Beulah Quintet, and her Blood Tie was the winner of the National Book Award. Settle has received an Award for Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and awards from the Southern Regional Council, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Merrill Foundation. She is the founder of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. The author, most recently, of Choices, Settle's backlist is published with new introductions by the author by the University of South Carolina Press. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.