"But in that childhood time of enchantment and love, it never seemed to me anything but part of the eternal."Ĭarrollton labeled her early, and unfavorably, as "smart." Taunted by her classmates, "ostracized and mocked at," she would sneak off to the woods to write, acts of defiance that left her with "pangs of feeling 'different,' evasiveness and secret anxieties." Life was eased and haunted by the subservient presence of blacks, "an ugly system, of course," Spencer wrote in her memoir. Born in 1921, Spencer was descended from plantation owners and grew up in a community where girls were chastised for smoking, gossip was forbidden (but flourished anyway) and matrons lived in columned mansions. Spencer was a final link to the pre-World War II South and to an era when Welty and other writers from that region struggled for national recognition. “I think her importance as an American writer is just being recognized, even though she’s been called a master since the 1940s,” Gurganus said in a phone interview.Īdmired by Eudora Welty and Alice Munro among others, Spencer wrote the novels "The Snare" and "The Salt Line" and dozens of short stories, most recently for the 2014 collection "Starting Over." She also completed a play, "For Lease or Sale," and the memoir "Landscapes of the Heart." Her many honors included the Rea Award and PEN/Malamud prize for lifetime achievement in short fiction, five O'Henry prizes for short stories and membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
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