Elizabeth Spencer was born in Carrollton, Mississippi, on July 19, 1921, the daughter of James Luther Spencer and Mary James McCain. She attended Belhaven College in Jackson, MS, and became acquainted with Eudora Welty, who lived across the street from the college. At Vanderbilt she earned a master's degree in English and became a teacher. Her first year as a teacher was at the community college in Senatobia, MS; and her second and last was at Belmont College in Nashville. For a time she was a journalist for the Nashville Tennessean (1945-1946). In 1946, her first novel, Fire in the Morning, was published; whereupon, she was offered a job teaching freshman English and some creative writing at Ole Miss. In 1953 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship; whereupon, she moved to Italy, where she met an Englishman (John Rusher) and married him (1956). They lived in Italy for five years, before moving to Quebec, Canada. In 1986 they moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where Elizabeth once again became a teacher. In 1998 her husband died. She has continued to live there and write after she retired. She believes that a writer who is no longer a writer is like a piece of furniture that's ready for the attic.Her last book, The Southern Woman: New and Selected Fiction, was published in 2001.

Despite the fact that Elizabeth Spencer had published over a dozen award-winning books by 1989, when the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture was published, and herself had been awarded the Natonal Institute of Arts and Letters Award (1953), the Guggenheim Fellowship Award (1953), the Rosenthal Foundation Award and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award (1956), had been chosen a Kenyon College Fellow in Fiction (1957), had won the first McGraw-Hill Fiction Award (1960), and half a dozen other prestigious awards and fellowships--she was not mentioned.in this exhaustive record of Southern cultural history.

A complete list of her writings:

Fire in the Morning (1948)
This Crooked Way (1952)
Voice at the Back Door (1956)
Light in the Piazza (1960) short fiction
The Knights and Dragons (1965) novel
No Place for An Angel (1967) novel
Ship Island and Other Stories (1968)
The Snare (1972) novel
Marilee (1981) short stories
The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer (1981)
The Mules (1982)
The Salt Line (1984)
Jack of Diamonds and Other Stories (1988)
Innocence Betrayed (1989) novel
On the Gulf (1991)
The Night Travellers (1991) war stories
Landscapes of the Heart : A Memoir (1997)

Books About Elizabeth Spencer:

Conversations with Elizabeth Spencer (1991)
The Southern Woman: New and Selected Fiction (2001)Ê