Elizabeth Spencer Novels Stories Loa 344

On her centennial, a contemporary of Flannery O’Connor and Harper Lee joins the Library of America with a volume that restores to print her searing novel about the late Jim Crow South Elizabeth Spencer (1921-2019) was a major figure of the Southern Renaissance, though today her many books and stories are scattered or out of print. This Library of America volume brings together the very best of her writing--three novels and nineteen stories--from a career spanning more than six decades. The Voice at the Back Door (1957), greeted by The New Yorker as "a practically perfect novel" and here restored to print, portrays small-town life in Mississippi during the late Jim Crow era and the self-interest and hatred that kept injustice firmly in place. Published two years after the Emmett Till lynching, it captures the spitting vehemence of its white characters' speech and may have been proven too potentially controversial for the Pulitzer board (which awarded no prize in 1957). Also included in this volume are The Light in the Piazza (1960), Spencer's most famous work, a deftly poignant comedy about Americans abroad that was adapted to the screen by Guy Green; and a second superb Italian novella, Knights and Dragons (1965), reminiscent of Henry James's novels in its atmosphere, interiority, and concern with transplanted Americans. Spencer excelled in the short story form and this volume presents a career-spanning selection by editor Michael Gorra that ranges from the early "First Dark" (1959), a kind of ghost story about a spectral oversized house in a Southern town, to the valedictory "The Wedding Visitor" (2013), about the refusal to let the all-enveloping world of place, family, and childhood define one's adult life. Spencer's special focus was families, and few writers have so brilliantly plumbed the passions that unite them and the inner upheavals that can tear them apart.

THIRTY-THREE STORIES WRITTEN OVER A SPAN OF 40 YEARS. SPENCER HAS WON NUMEROUS AWARDS, INCLUDING TWO O. HENRY AWARDS, AND IS THE AUTHOR OF "LIGHT IN THE PIAZZA."

The magnetic appeal of land, sea, and sky along the southern coast has drawn Elizabeth Spencer many times to this lush and semitropical setting. This collection brings together six of her stories set amid terrain lapped by the warm coastal currents. These stories all happen on the shoreline of the Gulf of Mexico, from New Orleans to Florida. In each, a girl or young woman gives voice to the narrative, probing and groping for a secure place and identity. The six stories included here are “On the Gulf,” “The Legacy,” “A Fugitive's Wife,” “Mr. McMillan,” “Go South in the Winter,” and “Ship Island.” Each reveals the special allure of the Gulf Coast region through the author's depiction of character and engagement with the complexities of plot. In these stories that illuminate the lives of sundry females—from insecure waifs to novice seductresses—Spencer investigates female psyche, a topic which lies at the core of much of her fiction.

A focused character study of a recurring figure in the fiction of one of Mississippi's greatest writers

The arrival of an innocent stranger sets old arguments and new passions swirling in Spencer's compelling tale of the half-forgotten integrity, the well-deep understanding of father and son, and ultimately, the eternal vision of a true home.

Disturbed American woman, living in Rome, is haunted by the spectre of her ex-husband and avoids the American colony, as she carries on discreet little affairs.

In these interrelated stories set in Mississippi, Marilee Summerall reflects on her past and comes to an understanding of her present and how she arrived there.

A volume of top-selected works by the PEN/Malamud-winning author features pieces written throughout the past half century and includes the tales, "The Little Brown Girl," "First Dark," and "The Light in the Piazza." Reprint.