Landscapes of the Heart: A Memoir (Voices of the South)

Deeply rooted in the customs and culture of the American South, seedbed of countless extraordinary writers, Elizabeth Spencer also spent time in Italy and Canada, where she lived with her husband. She portrays her family and formative experiences with clear-sighted affection in luminous, deceptively simple prose familiar to readers of novels such as The Light in the Piazza. Literary friends, from Eudora Welty to Alberto Moravia, are captured with evocative aplomb. Spencer can nail an entire personality in a single phrase, as when she portrays Saul Bellow circa 1949, "at ease with himself and his talent."