Elizabeth Spencer

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.

In 1957, the fiction jury of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction recommended that she should be awarded that year's prize for her novel, The Voice at the Back Door, but the Pulitzer board, which has sole discretion for awarding the prize, made no award.