DURANT, OK -- Friends are remembering a former SOSU professor whose storyline about a woman living in Wal-Mart catapulted her to literary stardom.


Billie Letts, who died this month, liked to write short stories.  But after a visit to a writers conference with her friend, she set to work on a novel, which was eventually chosen for Oprah's book club.


"After that novel came out, people from Wal-Mart told her that you couldn't really do that because there'd be cleaning people coming around each day," says Letts's friend Marion Hill.


Still, this July, employees at a Wal-Mart in Corsicana, Tex., discovered a 14-year-old boy had been hiding for 2 days inside the store.


Letts, who used to live at 9th and Pine and shopped at the old Durant Wal-Mart, now Big Lots, came up with a short story involving a  pregnant woman.


"Billie began thinking about it one day when she was in Wal-Mart and she said, 'You know, they have everything you need in order to live here, they have food and they have places to sleep, a tent,'" says Hill.


"She thought she was really going to be a playwright, or a script writer," says Letts's friend Elbert Hill.


Then, she and her friend Marion, a fellow professor and member of a writing "critique group," took a trip.


"She and I went to a writers conference in New Orleans. She met a woman there who became her literary agent and who sold all 4 of Billie's books," says Marion Hill.


The agent decided it should be a novel, but Marion says Letts was anxious.


She decided to approach it as a series of short stories.


"The book 'Where the Heart Is' sold to Warner Books, and she got a pretty good advance for it, and so not long after that, she quit teaching and just concentrated on her writing." says Hill.


After 3 decades of teaching, much of that at Southeastern, Letts's own writing had made the big time, and then it hit the big screen.


The movie, starring Natalie Portman and Ashley Judd, came out in 2000.


"And she said, 'I feel like I'm living someone else's life,'" says Hill. "She had been thinking about some of her poorer students, I think that kind of got her thinking about [main character] Nova Lee."


After retiring from SOSU, where she was an English instructor from the 1970s to the '90s, Letts moved back to her hometown of Tulsa, where she died this month at age 76.


Her son is also a writer. His play "August: Osage County" also became a movie with Meryl Streep, which was released this year.