'Light In the Piazza' author, Elizabeth Spencer dead at 98

New York

Elizabeth Spencer, a grande dame of Southern literature who bravely navigated between the Jim Crow past and open-ended present in her novels and stories including the celebrated novella "Light In the Piazza," has died at 98.

Spencer, who sometimes went by her married name Elizabeth Rusher, died Sunday night in Chapel Hill, N.C., according to playwright Craig Lucas, who adapted "Light In the Piazza" for the stage.

Old enough to know ex-slaves and Civil War veterans, Spencer chronicled her complicated affection for her ties to tiny Carrollton, Miss. — her determination to honor them and to leave them behind. Like her predecessor and fellow Mississippian, William Faulkner, she was an author praised by strangers and shunned by acquaintances.

"In a small town that's been there for ages, some people look out and some look in," she would write. "As for myself, I mainly just looked around me."

Her most famous work, "Light In the Piazza," is the story of a North Carolina woman in Florence who watches and worries as her mentally impaired daughter falls in love with an Italian. First published in The New Yorker and released in book form in 1960, it was an immediate critical favorite adapted into a 1962 movie that starred Olivia De Havilland and Yvette Mimieux and into a Broadway musical that in 2006 won six Tonys.

Admired 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...