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.
