Elizabeth Spencer is a writer. Spencer's first novel, Fire in the Morning, was published in 1948. She has written a total of nine novels, seven collections of short stories, a memoir , and a play . Her novella The Light in the Piazza was adapted for the screen in 1962 and transformed into a Broadway musical of the same name in 2005. She is a five-time recipient of the O. Henry Award for short fiction. Born in Carrollton, Mississippi, Spencer was valedictorian of her graduating class at local J.Z. George High School. She earned her Bachelor of Arts at Belhaven College in Jackson, Mississippi... and her Master's Degree in Literature at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee in 1943. Spencer taught at the junior-college level for two years before accepting a job with the Nashville Tennessean, but she soon returned to teaching, this time at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. In 1953 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and left Mississippi to live in Italy and pursue writing full time.
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