In the mid-1950s, the town of Lacey in the Mississippi hill country is a place where the lives of blacks and whites, though seemingly separate, are in fact historically and inevitably intertwined. When Lacey's fair-haired boy, Duncan Harper, is appointed interim sheriff, he makes public his private convictions about the equality of blacks before the law, and the combined threat and promise he represents to the understood order of things in Lacey affects almost every member of the community. In the end, Harper succeeds in pointing the way for individuals, both black and white, to find a...

"Spencer's refined, sensuous writing and laser insights inform this novel, as extraordinary as her other works." -- Publishers Weekly

At a certain point approaching the Mississippi coast, the air fills with the salt smell of the Gulf of Mexico. For all of the characters in Elizabeth Spencer's gracefully written novel, the salt line divides past and present, memory and longing, tranquillity and danger. Crossing it places everyone in the chaotic path of Arnie Carrington, former professor and 1960s campus radical, who is on a crusade to restore the small Gulf Coast town of Notchaki after...

With charm and vivid detail, the acclaimed novelist Elizabeth Spencer acquaints readers with the places and people, the pleasures and heartaches, she has known in her life. From her idyllic childhood in small-town Mississippi onward, a questioning spirit and voracity for reading and writing shape Spencer's course: her formal and informal educations at Vanderbilt and in Rome, Florence, New York, and Montreal, and her break with the culturally rigid segregated society from which she sprang; her friendships with such great writers as Eudora Welty, Saul Bellow, John Cheever, and Robert Penn...

Elizabeth Spencer is captivated by Italy. For her it has been a second home. A one-time resident who returns there, this native-born Mississippian has found Italy to be an enchanting land whose culture lends itself powerfully to her artistic vision.

Some of her most acclaimed work is set there. Her American characters encounter but never quite wholly adjust to the mysteries of the Italian mores. Collected here in one volume are Spencer's six Italian tales. Their plots are so alluring and enigmatic that Boccaccio would have been charmed by their delightful ironies and their sinister...

Elizabeth Spencer presents a vital, moving story set in the deep South--the Delta and Mississippi hill country. Amos Dudley was a farm boy in the Delta country at the turn of the century until he started working for his brother Ephraim in the store by the railroad. It was an ordinary enough environment in which to begin to feel the strange forces that move a man to set his course in the world.

Admirers of Elizabeth Spencer's writing will welcome back into print her first novel, and her new readers will discover the sources of her notable talent in this book. Published in 1948 to extraordinary attention from such eminent writers as Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, and Katherine Anne Porter, this father-and-son story revolves around an old southern theme of family grievances and vendettas.

Fire in the Morning recounts the conflict between two families extending over two generations up to the 1930s.The arrival of an innocent stranger flares old arguments and...

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,...

Winner of five O. Henry Awards and the 2013 Rea Prize for Short Fiction, Elizabeth Spencer has long been considered a master of the short story, yet her novels are no less a showcase for her uncanny ability to depict how "twisted, chafing, inescapable, and life-supporting" (Alice Munro) the ties that bind families and marriages are. Nowhere are these skills more evident than in her fourth novel, No Place for an Angel, a Jamesian portrait of Cold War America that follows two fracturing marriages Catherine and Jerry Sasser, a Texas heiress and a ruthless political fixer, and Irene...