Born in Carrollton in 1921, Elizabeth Spencer aspired to be a writer from an early age. Encouraged by writer Eudora Welty, whom she met while attending Belhaven College in Jackson, she earned a master's degree from Vanderbilt University and began a long career teaching and writing award-winning fiction. Her third novel, The Voice at the Back Door, set in Mississippi, was well received despite its graphic depiction of racial strife. Though she continued to draw on Southern sources of family and history, she was no longer tied to them and set her next work, The Light in the Piazza, in Italy, where it became a popular movie and a highly acclaimed musical and opera. Her enduring fondness for her native Carrollton is evident in her 1998 memoir, Landscapes of the Heart, and her works are collected in the distinguished Library of America Series.