Elizabeth
Spencer


Biography of
Elizabeth Spencer
by Lanetra Collins (Starkville
High School)
From: http://www.shs.starkville.k12.ms.us/mswm/MSWritersAndMusicians/writers/Spencer.html
Elizabeth Spencer's experiences as a Southerner, a world traveler,
and a college-trained educator are expressed throughout her many works of
fiction. Although Spencer has lived all around the world, she displays a
Southern sensibility. She writes with imaginative dialogue, spirited narrative,
and a well-defined sense of place in which all is the grand tradition of
Southern writers.
Elizabeth Spencer was born on July 19, 1921 in Carrollton, Mississippi, to James
Luther and Mary James McCain Spencer. In 1942, Spencer received a Bachelor’s
Degree in English from Belhaven College in Jackson, Mississippi. Upon
graduation, she attended Vanderbilt University where she
received a Master’s Degree. Afterwards, Spencer taught for two years; first, at
Northwest Mississippi Junior
College in Senatobia, Mississippi; and then, at Belmont College in Nashville, Tennessee. She resigned
from teaching to work as a reporter for the Nashville Tennessean. In
1946, Spencer abandoned the craft of the journalist for that of the novelist,
and her first novel, Fire in the Morning, was published two years
later. She has been a full-time writer
ever since.
On September
29, 1956, Elizabeth Spencer married John Rusher. Spencer’s books
include: Fire in the Morning (1948), This Crooked Way (1952), The Voice at the Back Door (1956), The Light in the Piazza (1960), Knights and Dragon (1965), No Place For an Angel (1967), Ship Island and Other Stories (1968), The Snare (1972), The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer (1981), and The Salt Line (1984).
Spencer has received many awards and
honors for her writing including a Women's Democratic Committee Award--1949;
National Institute of Arts and Letters Award--1953; Guggenheim Fellowship
Award- 1953; Rosenthal Foundation Award, American Academy of Art and Letters
--1956; Kenyon College Fellow in Fiction -- 1957; First McGraw-Hill Fiction
Award--1960; Bryn Mawr College Donnelly Fellow--1962;
Henry Bellamann Award for Creative Writing--1968; and
D. L., Southwestern University--1968. She also received writing fellowships to
the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference--1951, Bryn Mawr
--1963, University of North
Carolina --1969, University of Indiana
Summer Writer's Workshop--1971, 1973, Hollins College --1973, and
most recently the Award of Merit Medal for the Short Story by the American Academy of Arts and
Letters--1983.
The Southern
Woman: New and Selected Fiction
By Elizabeth Spencer
Modern Library, $23.95
ISBN: 0679642188

Elizabeth Spencer
Meet the Author Tea
January 18, 2002
From:
http://www.friendschpl.org/friends/tea_archive/tea2002 spencer.html
The recent Modern Library edition of Elizabeth Spencer's short
fiction, titled The Southern Woman, is but the latest affirmation of
excellence Spencer has received during her productive and illustrious career.
This elegant new compilation contains 27 stories, covering every period from
the 1940s to the present, and divides them into four categories: "The
South," "Italy,"
"Up North" and "New Stories," which includes six
previously unpublished works.
Elizabeth Spencer has been tagged a Southern Writer, an
Expatriate Writer, and a Feminist Writer -- in truth, she is all this and
much more. While her protagonists do tend to be women, her themes are
universal and grapple with topics such as selfhood and the price one must pay
to be independent, race relations, class consciousness, alienation, despair
and evil, beautifully illuminating the complexities of the human condition.
Her most masterful stories are richly ambiguous, revealing more with each
successive reading.
Born into a well-to-do family in Carrolton, Mississippi in 1921,
Spencer has set many of her works in the hill country and deltas of Mississippi and Louisiana. She met her
lifelong friend Eudora Welty while at Belhaven
college in Jackson, and began
to write seriously after a year of graduate school at Vanderbilt. In her 1998
memoir Landscapes of the Heart, Spencer reveals that after a post-college
grand tour of Europe, she returned home where an argument
with her father made her realize "You don't belong here anymore."
She spent much of the 1950s in Italy, then lived in Quebec, Canada for numerous
years, setting many of her works in these countries.
Spencer is the author of numerous novels and story collections
including Fire in the Morning, Jack of Diamonds, The Night Travellers, On the Gulf and The Stories of
Elizabeth Spencer. Her most famous work is the novella "The Light in
the Piazza", which The New Yorker - in a rare move - published in
its entirety in a single issue. Acknowledged as one of America's
outstanding fiction writers, Spencer received the Award of Merit Medal for
the Short Story from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and letters
in 1983. She has received five O'Henry prizes, and
her stories have been included in editions of the O'Henry
Prize Stories and The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses.
|
From: Senior Women Web: Culture
Watch by Eileen Frost
Located at: http://www.seniorwomen.com/cult090601.html
In The Master at Shongalo
a bright teenager invites her English teacher to spend the weekend at Shongalo, her opulent home. It has enough acreage to
encompass sunken gardens and a herd of cattle kept sufficiently far away from
the house that not "so much as a moo" was
ever heard. The teacher has the chance to observe this family up close: the
father, "whose regard was for his property," and the mother with her
"inward air…content in her place as Robert Stratton's wife at Shongalo, not needing to seek anything to fill her
time." The parents are superficially cordial. "Among the rooms at Shongalo trivial conversations could spin on forever."
Ultimately, however, the teacher recognizes that, for the parents, "I'm
nobody really. A teacher from the town," someone to serve a purpose as
their daughter's chaperone and then dismissed.
Credits
[Ed. Note: I DO NOT take any credit whatsoever for any of the information
provided above. It was copied from the
internet and is the work of the person or entity named in each heading. It is they who compiled and reviewed the
information. My sole purpose is to put
it in a common location. Please visit
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Top Left Photo: The Mississippi Writers and Musicians Project
at Starkville High School located at http://www.shs.starkville.k12.ms.us/mswm/MSWritersAndMusicians/writers/Spencer.html
Top Right Photo: Chattanooga Conference on Southern
Literature located at
http://www.artsedcouncil.org/2/fellows/spencer.html