Elizabeth Spencer (writer)

Elizabeth Spencer (born July 19, 1921) is an American writer. 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. She currently lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Born in Carrollton, Mississippi, Spencer was valedictorian of her graduating class at J.Z. George High School. She earned her BA at Belhaven College in Jackson, Mississippi and a master's in literature at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee in 1943.

Spencer taught at the junior college level at Northwest Mississippi in Senatobia 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 in Italy, she met and married John Rusher of Cornwall, England. The couple moved to Montreal, Canada in 1961, where they remained until moving to Chapel Hill, North Carolina in 1986. She taught creative writing at Concordia University in Montreal, and at the University of North Carolina until her retirement. Rusher died in 1998, and Spencer continues to live in Chapel Hill.

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