Growing up in Tulsa, Billie Letts figured out early on that she wasn't going to be a beauty queen. "I had pumpkin-red hair that was as untamable as tangled baling wire," she recalls. "My body looked like a stick figure drawn by a 4-year-old with a sharp pencil and a dull sense of proportion." Too clumsy, she felt, for sports, Letts had a quick mind and a keen eye for detail. So she concentrated on writing stories, and when she was 12 won a local writing contest. "It was one of the proudest days of my life," she says. "I dreamed of walking into a bookstore and seeing a book with my name on it."

It took a few decades, but Letts's dream has finally come true—and then some. In 1995, Letts, then 56, published her first novel, Where the Heart Is, which brought her a movie deal. But that was just a prelude. Chosen last December by Oprah Winfrey for her book club, Where the Heart Is shot to the top of the New York Times paperback bestseller list in January. The exposure also benefited Letts's second novel, last summer's Honk and Holler Opening Soon. What is Letts's appeal? "Her [true-to-life] characters and stories of human growth," says Donna Cressman, at whose DeSoto, Texas, bookstore Letts has appeared. "Her characters care for each other in a special way. People can relate to their struggles."

In Where the Heart Is, Novalee Nation, a pregnant teenager traveling cross-country, is deserted by her boyfriend but forges a family from the small-town eccentrics hanging around the Sequoyah, Okla., Wal-Mart. Honk and Holler Opening Soon is about the friends and customers of wheelchair-bound Caney Paxton, owner of the roadside diner whose curious name gives the book its title. Says Letts of the characters in what she calls her Okie stories: "They're ordinary folks trying to get by with a little bit of dignity. They deal with serious issues while still finding some joy in their lives."

The only daughter of Bill Gipson, an air-conditioning repairman in Tulsa, and his wife, Virginia, a secretary, Letts did well enough in school to become the first member of her family to go to college. To earn tuition money she worked as a roller-skating carhop, a dance instructor at the local Arthur Murray studio and a secretary for a private investigator. It was at Northeast Oklahoma State College (now Northeastern State University) in the late '50s that she met Dennis Letts, now 64, an aspiring English professor she married in 1958 and with whom she has two grown sons (Shawn, 39, a jazz musician, and Tracy, 33, a playwright).

Itinerant educators, the couple settled in 1970 in Durant, Okla. (pop. 12,000), where they joined the English department at Southeastern Oklahoma State University. And though Letts wrote lots of short stories and screenplays during her years in academia, success eluded her until 1993, when New York City literary agent Elaine Markson, whom she met at a writers conference, encouraged her to turn her tale about Novalee Nation into a novel. Warner Books bought Where the Heart Is two years later, and Letts was bestseller-bound. "When I actually saw the book [on the shelves], I broke down and cried," she says. "I finally felt like a real writer."

Recently retired from teaching, Letts is now free to write full-time, lately working on a screenplay for Honk and Holler with son Tracy, whose play Killer Joe made a splash Off-Broadway this season. It should be an interesting collaboration. Tracy tends to write "very gritty things," according to his mother. "All of his characters either get naked or dead."

Husband Dennis, meanwhile, has also launched his own post-retirement career, doing bit parts in 40-odd movies and TV shows, including Walker, Texas Ranger and Square-dance. But Letts is center stage in the family drama. "She's a remarkable woman," says Dennis, "and not because she's suddenly become a best-selling author. This house has always been a place where people come to talk out their problems or just visit. She's great at being a friend in good times and bad."

Says Letts: "If all this success had happened to me when I was 25, I'd probably have thought I was really something and big-dogged it. But now it hasn't changed anything. I am what I am. I still write, cook a pretty mean fried chicken and love to fish for crappie."

Peter Ames Carlin
Carlton Stowers in Durant