Elizabeth Spencer, "a lyrical Southern writer whose novels and short stories explored the conflicts and inner lives of ordinary people and families and communities drawn from her native Mississippi and from decades abroad in Italy and Canada," died December 23, the New York Times reported. She was 98. Her death was confirmed by the playwright Craig Lucas, who adapted her novella The Light in the Piazza (1960) for the stage.
Spencer published nine novels, eight short story collections, a memoir and a play. Her novel The Voice at the Back Door (1956) was unanimously chosen by a Pulitzer Prize jury, "but the governing committee chose to give no prize for fiction in 1957. Some critics have said that Ms. Spencer's candor about virulent segregationist racism was the reason," the Times wrote.
Ship Island and Other Stories (1968), Spencer's first collection, was dedicated to her friend Eudora Welty, who later wrote the foreword to The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer (1981).
Her best-known work, The Light in the Piazza, was originally published in the New Yorker and selected as a National Book Award finalist. It was later adapted into the 1962 film starring Olivia de Havilland, and as a 2005 musical, written by Lucas with music and lyrics by Adam Guettel, that won six Tony Awards.
Spencer was a five-time winner of the O. Henry Award for short stories and in 2007 won the PEN/Malamud Award for short fiction, "placing her in the company of writers such as Alice Munro, whom film critic Molly Haskell once described as Ms. Spencer's 'sister under the skin,' " the Washington Post noted.
With Walker Percy, Shelby Foote and others, she helped found the Fellowship of Southern Writers, a nonprofit organization that nurtures the development of literature in the South.