Landscapes of the heart

Elizabeth Spencer is the author of several justly praised short story collections and novels, among them The Light in the Piazza, which was made into a motion picture. Beginning with her youth in Mississippi and her sheltered upbringing among family and friends, she tells not only her own story but that of a place and time that have since disappeared. She writes also of her friendships with Eudora Welty, Robert Penn Warren, and others who have sustained her. Elizabeth Spencer earned a masters degree in literature at Vanderbilt University and taught for a time in the South before setting out for New York, where her first novel was published. Having acquired a taste for other places, and feeling increasingly estranged from the South owing to the racial tension there, she traveled extensively, living for some years in Italy and Canada, before returning "home" to North Carolina. Elizabeth Spencer describes her encounters with writers - William Faulkner, Saul Bellow, Alberto Moravia - without hero worship or embellishment; her portraits are respectful, honest, and often witty.