No Place for an Angel (41 page)

Read No Place for an Angel Online

Authors: Elizabeth Spencer

The Night Travellers

The Salt Line

The Snare

Knights and Dragons

The Light in the Piazza

The Voice at the Back Door

This Crooked Way

Fire in the Morning

STORY COLLECTIONS

Starting Over

The Southern Woman

On the Gulf

Jack of Diamonds and Other Stories

Marilee

Ship Island and Other Stories

MEMOIR

Landscapes of the Heart

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ELIZABETH SPENCER
was born in Carrollton, Mississippi, in 1921. She graduated from Belhaven College in 1942 and received an MA in English from Vanderbilt University the following year. For two years she taught in schools in Mississippi and Tennessee, and for a year was a reporter on the
Nashville Tennesseen
.

Spencer's first novel,
Fire in the Morning
, was published in 1948, and was declared by the
New York Times Book Review
one of the best first novels of the year. It was followed in 1952 by her second novel,
This Crooked Way
, while she was teaching creative writing at the University of Mississippi. In 1953, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship and was able to go to Italy, where she lived principally in Florence and Rome. Her third novel,
The Voice at the Back Door
, won several awards, including the Rosenthal Award and the Kenyon Review Fiction Fellowship. In Italy, she met and married John Rusher from Cornwall, and was able to extend her Italian stay until 1956.

The Light in the Piazza
, first published in
The New Yorker
in 1960, was brought out also as a novel and was the basis for a movie of that name in 1962. Most recently it has become a musical drama, premiering on Broadway in 2005. It won five Tony Awards and is still being performed in theaters throughout the United States.

Five other novels have followed, including
No Place for an Angel, The Salt Line
, and
The Snare.

Spencer's stories have appeared often in
The New Yorker
and various magazines.
The Southern Woman
(1998) is a selection of the best known.
Starting Over
, containing nine recent stories (Norton/Liveright), appeared in 2014. It was named by
Booklist
as one of the best books of the year.

Elizabeth Spencer now lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Copyright © 1967 by Elizabeth Spencer

First published as a Liveright paperback 2015

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,

write to Permissions, Liveright Publishing Corporation,

a division of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,

500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact
W. W. Norton Special Sales at [email protected] or 800-233-4830

Book design by Ellen Cipriano

Production manager: Lauren Abbate

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Spencer, Elizabeth, 1921–

No place for an angel : a novel / Elizabeth Spencer.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-63149-063-7 (pbk.)

1. Married people—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3537.P4454N64 2015

813′.54—dc23

2015009094

ISBN 978-1-63149-064-4 (e-book)

Liveright Publishing Corporation

500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

www.wwnorton.com

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.

Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

Other books

Carcass Trade by Noreen Ayres
The Vampire's Lover by Knight, Kayleen
Renegade Reborn by J. C. Fiske
THE CHRISTMAS BRIDE by Grace Livingston Hill
The Messiah Secret by James Becker
Deshi by John Donohue
End Times by Anna Schumacher