On her centennial, a contemporary of Flannery O’Connor and Harper Lee joins the Library of America with a volume that restores to print her searing novel about the late Jim Crow South
Elizabeth Spencer (1921-2019) was a major figure of the Southern Renaissance, though today her many books and stories are scattered or out of print. This Library of America volume brings together the very best of her writing—three novels and nineteen stories—from a career spanning more than six decades. The Voice at the Back Door(1957), greeted by The New Yorker as "a practically perfect novel" and here restored to print, portrays small-town life in Mississippi during the late Jim Crow era and the self-interest and hatred that kept injustice firmly in place. Published two years after the Emmett Till lynching, it captures the spitting vehemence of its white characters' speech and may have been proven too potentially controversial for the Pulitzer...
Description:
On her centennial, a contemporary of Flannery O’Connor and Harper Lee joins the Library of America with a volume that restores to print her searing novel about the late Jim Crow SouthElizabeth Spencer (1921-2019) was a major figure of the Southern Renaissance, though today her many books and stories are scattered or out of print. This Library of America volume brings together the very best of her writing—three novels and nineteen stories—from a career spanning more than six decades.
The Voice at the Back Door (1957), greeted by The New Yorker as "a practically perfect novel" and here restored to print, portrays small-town life in Mississippi during the late Jim Crow era and the self-interest and hatred that kept injustice firmly in place. Published two years after the Emmett Till lynching, it captures the spitting vehemence of its white characters' speech and may have been proven too potentially controversial for the Pulitzer...