Elizabeth Spencer (writer)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Elizabeth Spencer (July 19, 1921) is an American writer.

Born in Carrollton, Mississippi, Spencer was valedictorian of her graduating class at local J.Z. George High School. She earned her Bachelor of Arts at Belhaven College in Jackson, Mississippi and her Master's Degree in Literature at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee in 1943.

Spencer taught at the junior college level for two years before accepting a job with the Nashville Tennessean, but she soon returned to teaching, this time at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. In 1953 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and left Mississippi to live in Italy and pursue writing full time. While there she met and married John Rusher of Cornwall, England. The couple moved to Canada in 1961 where they remained until 1986, at which time they settled in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She taught creative writing at the University of North Carolina until her retirement. Rusher died in 1998, and Spencer continues to live in Chapel Hill.

Spencer's first novel, Fire in the Morning, was published in 1948. She has written a total of nine novels, seven collections of short stories, a memoir (Landscapes of the Heart, 1998), and a play (For Lease or Sale, 1989). Her novella The Light in the Piazza (1960) was adapted for the screen in 1962 and transformed into a Broadway musical of the same name in 2005. She is a five-time recipient of the O. Henry Award for short fiction.