"Championed by Robert Penn Warren and Eudora Welty early in her career, Elizabeth Spencer (1921-2019) was a major fiction writer of the later Southern Renaissance, though she continued to produce first-rate fiction well into the twenty-first century and found settings for her stories and novels beyond the South. Today, her many books and stories are scattered or out of print. This volume brings together her best 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," portrays small-town life in Mississippi during the Jim Crow era and the self-interest and hatred that kept injustice firmly in place. Published two years after the Emmett Till lynching, it cuts uncomfortably close in ventriloquizing the spitting vehemence of its white characters' speech and may have been proven too potentially controversial for the Pulitzer board (which awarded no prize in 1957). Also included in this volume are The Light in the Piazza (1960), Spencer's most famous work, a deft poignant comedy about Americans abroad that was adapted to the screen by Guy Green; and a second superb Italian novella, Knights and Dragons (1965), reminiscent of Henry James's novels in its atmosphere, interiority, and concern with transplanted Americans. The short story is perhaps the genre for which Spencer is best known. Included here is a selection of her best short fiction, from the early "First Dark" (1959), a kind of ghost story about a spectral oversized house in a Southern town, to the valedictory "The Wedding Visitor" (2013), about the refusal to let the all-enveloping world of place, family, and childhood define one's adult life. Frequently, Spencer's subject is families, and she understands as few writers have the passions that unite families and the inner upheavals that can tear them apart"-- Provided by publisher.