The Voice at the Back Door

by Elizabeth Spencer

In the mid-1950s, the town of Lacey in the Mississippi hill country is a place where the lives of blacks and whites, though seemingly separate, are in fact historically and inevitably intertwined. When Lacey's fair-haired boy, Duncan Harper, is appointed interim sheriff, he makes public his private convictions about the equality of blacks before the law, and the combined threat and promise he represents to the understood order of things in Lacey affects almost every member of the community. In the end, Harper succeeds in pointing the way for individuals, both black and white, to find a more harmonious coexistence, but at a sacrifice all must come to regret. In The Voice at the Back Door, Mississippi native Elizabeth Spencer gives form to the many voices that shaped her view of race relations while growing up, and at the same time discovers her own voice - one of hope. Employing her extraordinary literary powers - finely honed narrative techniques, insight into a rich, diverse cast of characters, and an unerring ear for dialect - Spencer makes palpable the psychological milieu of a small southern town hobbled by tradition but lurching toward the dawn of the civil rights movement. First published in 1956, The Voice at the Back Door is Spencer's most highly praised novel yet, and her last to treat small-town life in Mississippi.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Southern, Literature, Literary Fiction, Novels, Classics

367 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1956

About the author

Elizabeth Spencer was an American writer. Spencer's first novel, Fire in the Morning, was published in 1948. She has written a total of nine novels, seven collections of short stories, a memoir (Landscapes of the Heart, 1998), and a play (For Lease or Sale, 1989). Her novella The Light in the Piazza (1960) was adapted for the screen in 1962 and transformed into a Broadway musical of the same name in 2005. She is a five-time recipient of the O. Henry Award for short fiction.

Reviews

[Michael Finocchiaro · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a gripping drama about the pre-Civil Rights racial tension in the south. Powerfully written, it has a great sensibility to the various forces in conflict without condescending to the people of color in the story. Spencer's writing, narration, and dialogs are impeccable and she truly got ripped off for 1957's Pulitzer for which the initial committee gave her the nod, but the final board decided it wasn't good enough and awarded no prize. It would take another 4 years before they would award a great book about racism in the South written by a white woman (To Kill a Mockingbird and 26 years before they would award a black woman writing about racism (The Color Purple).

I do recommend this book as it is fast-paced and feels realistic. The characters are interesting and well-drawn and the action and intrigue drives the story forward. A great read.

Once nice paragraph:
It was a room whose thoroughly old-fashioned proportions had
not been altered: it had a ceiling that vanished in shadow, and
windows that dropped to the floor. Though scarcely pantry-size
by the old standards, it was far too large for small company. Yet
the woman who had touched it had understood both its own nature
and what she wanted from it. She had gathered it toward the
fireplace, faced every modern sort of softness and comfort into
the mantlepiece. Only this part of the room was lighted, and the
light did not go high. She loved to have a fire and would bring
in wood for it by herself, if no one was there to help. A fire seemed
to put her into some kind of timeless mood, the way it does a cat,
except that she watched it, and a cat doesn't. She could not take
her eyes off it, as if for fear of missing some new subtlety. She
was watching it now. (p.19)

[Diane Barnes · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book that bears some thinking about. It's a book that could only have been written by a Southerner with a conscience and intelligence that allows her to see all sides of an issue, and create characters who illustrate all points of view sympathetically. Everything about the South that makes us so hard to understand by others is touched upon here. The complexity of race relations, the meaning of home and family, right vs wrong, depending on why and when, loyalty, love, marriage, and a way of life. Elizabeth Spencer gets it all just right, and by the last page, let's us see how lying and hypocrisy become second nature to politicians, even ones who start out with good intentions.

[Randall Luce · Rating 4 out of 5]

The subject matter, and time and place, of "The Voice at the Back Door" will bring inevitable comparisons to "To Kill A Mockingbird." Both southern, written in the 1950's; both deal with the controversial issue of race.

But that's were the similarities end. Mockingbird is justly famous. "The Voice at the Back Door" is unjustly obscure. (Kudos to the Southern Literary Trail reading group for bringing it to my attention.) Mockingbird has a clear hero and a clear villain. In "The Voice at the Back Door" the protagonist and antagonist are equally sympathetic, and equally flawed. And in the end, for present-day sensibilities at least, "The Voice at the Back Door" goes farther than "Mockingbird" in championing civil rights for blacks.

I had read some of Elizabeth Spencer short stories and found them to be very evocative. The Southern Woman: New and Selected Fiction Her writing about southern women can be exquisite. So I was surprised to find in "The Voice at the Back Door" a hard-boiled plot worthy of Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain: roadhouses, bootleg liquor, local politics and the mob.

The story revolves around two men, Duncan and Jimmy, and two women, Marcia Mae and Tinker. When Duncan becomes acting sheriff in his Mississippi hill-country county, he means to do two things: treat blacks equally to whites under the law, and close down the bootleggers. This puts him at odds with Jimmy, who runs a roadhouse supplied by the county's biggest bootlegger.

Jimmy always loved Tinker, who always loved Duncan. As the novel begins, in the mid-1950's, Tinker and Duncan are married, with children. Years earlier, just before WWII, Marcia Mae had left Duncan "at the alter," to run off with a soldier from California. As the action starts up in the novel, Marcia Mae, now widowed, comes back home to town. Complications ensue.

And whose voice is at the back door? That would be Beck Dozer, a black man, tied by a bond of violence to Jimmy, who wants nothing more than to walk the streets of town with his head always up, and to cede its sidewalks to no white man. And whose back door? That would be Duncan's. And that's when things get interesting.

The hard-boiled plot is very well done. But to me, where Spencer really shines is in her prose, particularly in the chapter where Marcia Mae finally explains to Duncan why she left him. She wanted him to run-off with her. But his whole life was bound up in their home town. She tells him:

It was a day a lot like this one: hot, shady, beautiful, still. The lawn was lovely and the house was quiet. You could even think that death was something like poetry. When the swing went back I thought, With all this horror in people how can things look so beautiful? and when the swing went forward I thought, It is so beautiful maybe the horror isn't real, and then I put my foot on the ground and stopped the swing, because I saw them both, both together, the beauty and the horror, like one gorgeous rotten fruit. That was when I knew we'd have to leave. I had an absolute conviction of it.

(Even if you haven't read novel, click that spoiler. Spencer's prose is worth it.)

[Richard Derus · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rating: 3* of five

The Book Report: Travis Brevard is dying, and he knows it. For years, he's kept the lid on his county, the sheriff without rivals or challengers, turning a blind eye to what suits him not to see and zooming in like an owl on a mouse if he's a mind to; but this 1949 day, his life is over and he knows it. Not convenient with a tax list in his pocket, doom for them that hasn't paid and salvation for the elect on the list, and an election before too long. Looks like Travis needs to make sure there's an anointed successor.

He chooses Duncan Harper, town grocer, husband of Tinker and still in love with Marcia Mae Hunt, socially far above a mere shopkeeper and son of a shopkeeper; now returned to her hometown, a war widow, and a source of anxiety for Tinker...and Duncan.

So is set in motion the plot of [Antigone]...the power change is coming, huzzah huzzah, but not without deaths and secrets exploding in the faces of all and sundry. King Creon's role is assumed by Jimmy Tallant (formerly the swain of Tinker), a bootlegger who advocates for the power of the state and the adherence to the law, albeit as the law is actually practiced if not written. Antigone, mourning love lost or died, is Duncan's role, the advocate for the right of the actual people, as opposed to the state-constituted We-the-People, to assemble and thereby agree on and cause change.

The structure of the argument between the two forces is the campaign for sheriff, eating up that entire summer. At the end of the book, a crime is resolved, the new sheriff is baptized in the deep and cold pool of race and politics as practiced in the Southern States since the end of Reconstruction exactly as in ancient Athens during its civil unrest and social change during Sophocles' time, and a tangle of old feelings, old hurts, and old bonds reformed...all the same strands that drama has always woven into cloth, whether whole and bright enough of color to last for centuries or not, since catharsis was invented by the priestly healers and crying in reflected rage and pain was recognized as more medicinal than the finest potions or pills could ever be.

My Review: Spencer's well-mannered Southern-lady language, with its stateliness and its rather deliberate pace, will likely jangle in modern ears. Her liberal (!) use of the n-word (I loathe political correctness, but I was raised by a mama who thumped me if I uttered that word because it was disrespectful of people I'd never met, and that was Not Allowed, so I just can't type it...I flinch too hard, waiting for the blow) is not of today, not done in coolness. (I go on record here as thinking that behavior is not cool, no matter who does it. I also don't like constant swearing for the same reason: It's not cool. It's just ill-mannered.)

Well, anyway, this novel won the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, at least according to the jury, but the board declined to award the novel the prize. Rather like 2012, the board felt the jury chose an inadequate exemplar of the year's American fiction crop. Happen I agree, in this case, as I agreed with the board's 2012 decision not to award a prize to any of the literary chaff nominated by the 2012 jury. Only I can't find a list of the other books the judges considered, so I can't say I the board was simply being conservative (in 1957, remember, the Little Rock riots happened and LBJ got the first-ever civil rights legislation through a very very very scared and divided Congress, so there's some logic to this) or if the field consisted of microbooks like it did this year (srsly, [Swamplandia!] for a literary prize?! Sheesh).

This isn't High Literature, and it's nowhere near as good as Spencer's short fiction. It's just fine. It's a middlin'-good story, it's got nicely drawn characters that I've already gone hazy on, and it's got a few lovely turns of phrase that are so typically Southern that I felt no need to note them down.

I'd put it in the Better Beach Reads category of my own private bookstore. More meat than *shudder* Dan Brown. A book for Rehoboth Beach, not Venice Beach.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

[Lobstergirl · Rating 4 out of 5]

A candidate for sheriff in a small Mississippi town in the 50s would like to have racial equality, but the white supremacism is just too entrenched. "The voice at the back door" is the black neighbor, or the white neighbor's black servant - it would be inappropriate for them to come to the front door of a white family. Spencer, a Mississippian, was a huge talent. Her dialogue is perfect. All of her characters are complex and nuanced. Often the novel is funny, as one scene where a man from out of town visits and everyone realizes he looks exactly like a married couple's new baby.

p. 12: Travis rose experimentally.

p. 79: He passed some places he liked to see, houses low-set and deep in porches, screens, and tacked-on rooms that country people always add because they live from the inside of a house outward and hardly ever think about how a thing will look to themselves, much less to strangers going by in a car.

p. 87: Beck Dozer would not tell his wife where he was going.

"It's best you don't know. If something happens and they ast you, it's best you can just say, He never said."

"Next time I going to marry me a field nigger," said Lucy. "Somebody too tired at night to go out and get theyselves in trouble."

p. 120: It was McCutcheon, the Humphreys County sheriff, enormous in his custom-built trousers.

p. 156: She wore the baby at her waist as if it were a big bow tie.

p. 157: Follansbee touched his chin. It was not really a chin, only a gable on his neck.

[Jamie Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Deep South, his examination of contemporary Southern life and culture, Paul Theroux spends some time discussing American literature of the South. Writers such as William Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell gave readers the grand guignol view, of a land of freaks and geeks, violent, ignorant, and inbred. Southerners were so outraged by that portrayal that many of the authors were not welcomed back. Even when their novels were not full of grotesques, writers such as Harper Lee and Richard Wright kept reminding the world that in the land of Separate but Equal the separate part was fully implemented but the equal was ignored. The usual Southern response to these books was anger and indignation, and claims that the situation was more complex than it was presented, and that things were, slowly (very very slowly over generational time), getting somewhat better. Beneath it all seemed to run a drumbeat of fear, that if the blacks were allowed to compete on equal terms the whites would see their own prospects diminish.

The Voice at the Back Door is one of those books, and is often compared with To Kill a Mockingbird in its examination of Southern life, and in its unflattering view of white culture and power. Published in 1956 and set in rural Mississippi at the beginning of that decade, it traces the events of one long hot summer leading up to a sheriff’s election in a claustrophobic small town where everyone knows everyone else’s business. There are good guys and bad guys among the whites, but the good guys are flawed and the bad guys are schemers or thugs or idiots. In fact, most of the whites are contemptible in one way or another, while the blacks are ciphers who, with one exception, move through the story being acted upon rather that acting for themselves. The heart of the book is about race, but it is mentioned mostly in passing, and when discussed explicitly it usually shows whites behaving condescendingly, or like ignorant half-wits who are so sure of their eternal racial superiority that they feel they can say, or do, anything to blacks with no consequences. Rape a black woman? Join a lynch mob? All in a day’s work for the fine, god-fearing white folks of Lacey, Mississippi. The author, Elizabeth Spencer, has cleverly designed the plot so that the story seems to be about an election, but is really a look at the dynamics of race and power.

In the early 1950s the idea of civil rights for blacks was a vague rumbling on the horizon, something that was being openly discussed only in the big cities. In the rural South, life went on as it had since the end of the Civil War, with blacks and whites interacting frequently and mostly without trouble, but each always aware of their place and position. This was a time before the issues of civil rights had penetrated to the farthest reaches of society, hardening positions and raising a wall of suspicion and resentment between the races. In the time of this novel a white woman could move unconcernedly among blacks, or could call a black man passing by on the street and order him to assist her, even sending him to town for her over his objections that he needed to be somewhere. It was all cordial, but he knew better than to say no.

All that the whites wanted was for everything to stay the way it was, always and forever. The thirteenth amendment to the Constitution had abolished slavery and granted citizenship to blacks in 1865, but eight-five years later there was no question of allowing them to vote in rural Mississippi. In fact, one of the recurring fears of the whites was that if blacks got the vote they might begin to feel that they were just as good as us!, and whites were willing to use violence and intimidation to prevent that. Even educating blacks was considered a threat; blacks of course could not attend school with whites, and when one was set up to teach them basic reading and writing it was forced to close amid tragic circumstances. Whites dreaded the thought that blacks might demand equality, and be able to walk the streets and enter the shops the same as they did. This was completely unacceptable to them and even genteel little old ladies, whose meals were cooked, houses cleaned, and children raised by blacks, worked themselves into neo-Secessionist outrage at the thought of having to treat blacks as human beings.

And so the plot boils through the long Mississippi summer. Keeping things the same as always would mean supporting a moronic candidate for sheriff who was happy to take payoffs from bootleggers and gamblers, but many people would vote for him anyway because his opponent thought blacks should be treated fairly, something they could not abide. As the election nears the characters must confront their flaws and the hurt they have caused themselves and their loved ones. None of them can rise above their shortcomings, and most do not even try. Corruption and betrayal have always been part of their society, so why change now? The novel builds to an explosive climax and then ends with a muted, somber coda. Nothing has changed but everything is now in play. There is a storm on the horizon and they can see it coming. They will either have to accept the changing world or sink deeper and deeper into the mire of bigotry, racial hatred, and violence.

There are times when life imitates art, and some of the children and grandchildren of those days are still deep down in that swill. With a political party fomenting racism as a major part of its platform, those wretched sons and daughters of hatred feel free to release their innermost demons on society. In many ways we are still in rural Mississippi, and this is the long hot summer of our discontent.

[Thing Two · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is To Kill a Mockingbird for grownups. Published in 1956, it is full of characters who are not one thing or the other the way Harper Lee's characters are. Told through a narrator's perspective, the reader gets an up-close back-house view of the campaign between two men for a vacated sheriff's position in a small, Southern town. Spencer wrote this from the safety of Italy, and based it loosely on a rumored tale from her own hometown in Carroll County, Mississippi. She doesn't shy away from difficult subjects, which is probably why this book didn't win the 1957 Pulitzer, although it was the only nominee.

If you're interested in Southern history and excellent writing, I highly recommend this book.

[Teresa]

See my review at https://www.goodreads.com/review/show....

[Patricia Dusenbury · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the book that came before to Kill A Mockingbird. Published in 1956, it addresses the burdens of racial divisions in a Mississippi hill county. It is beautifully written with evocative descriptions and characters you care about. A review in The New Yorker called it a "practically perfect novel."

Beyond that, it is an example of authorial courage. Ms. Spencer, a woman living in Mississippi, was reviled after the publication and eventually moved to Italy.

The Voice at the Back Door is in my "permanent collection." I lend it out and if it's not returned, I buy another.

[Kirk Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am so impressed with this book. First published in 1956, pre-dating To Kill a Mockingbird, it is astonishingly honest writing for the time. What a courageous author Elizabeth Spencer is. If some things I read were true, she was reviled for addressing such touchy Race issues and escaped the situation by moving to Italy. There are so many great Southern Women Authors, I am pleased to include Elizabeth Spencer among other favorites like Harper Lee, Shirley Ann Grau, or Flannery O'Connor. A very good book.

[Old Man JP · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very ground-breaking novel for its time. Written in the early 50's the book deals with the extreme racism in the South that was taken for granted as normal behavior during this period. Taking place in Lacey Mississippi, the story follows Duncan Harper who is appointed sheriff when the current sheriff dies. Duncan has a fairly liberal opinion regarding the fairness of the law when applied to blacks and whites, which does not sit well with many of the citizens. Mixed in with this main theme is a lot of romantic entanglements between some of the characters and, also, the normal daily interactions between blacks and whites. It is a very well written book that, evidently, was considered for the Pulitzer but was probably not chosen because of its controversial content.

[Bill Silva · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF--I made it about 1/3 of the way through--the book may have been advanced for its time (it was first published in 1956), but I lost patience with the persistent racism and sexism in the descriptions of the characters and the storyline. It may be unfair to judge the "enlightened Southerner" of this time period in American history from the perspective of attitudes and values of today, but there was also no redeeming literary merit to the novel that offset this negative feature.

[Don · Rating 5 out of 5]

I downloaded this to my Kindle about 5 years ago, but never got around to reading it. With Spencer's recent passing, I decided to finally start it. Written in the late 1950's, it takes place in a small Mississippi town in 1952.

I've seem this paired up with To Kill A Mockingbird. Both are about race relations in the South prior to the civil rights movement. But there the similarities end. I read Mockingbird when I was 9 or 10 years old and it had a profound effect on me. It continues to be assigned reading in hundreds of high schools across the country.

Spencer's novel is not a book that can be appreciated by a pre-teen or, for that matter, a teenager. It's an adult novel, with complex themes and complicated characters. (For all its virtues, Mockingbird's characters aren't at all complicated--which, after all, is one of the book's virtues.)
The Voice at the Back Door is about race relations--and that is at the forefront of the book--but it's also about politics, sexual relationships, friendship, the choices people make and the compromises that some people make.

[Corinne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Elizabeth Spencer is the epitome of a Southern writer and I can see why this book was nominated for the Pulitzer. It is especially interesting because it was published the same year Emmett Till was murdered, often considered the symbolic beginning of the civil rights movement in the South. By the time this book was published, the old South was changing. The Easley Friends of the Library are showing a documentary on Spencer's life September 9th that prompted me to read this novel and her newest book of short stories.

[Terragyrl3 · Rating 3 out of 5]

The title refers to the custom of having black folks approach whites’ houses by the side or back doors only. This book was considered for the Pulitzer in 1959, just a smidge before To Kill A Mockingbird clinched it. The story is solid, if less captivating than TKAM. The characters are regular people, not heroes like Atticus Finch, but it is probably a more realistic picture of small town politics.

[Bettye · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. Beautifully written by fellow Mississippian Elizabeth Spencer, it deals with racial and political tensions in a rural MS county. If it were written today, I think it would equal The Help in its realistic portrayal of the times and the people.

[Christian Schwoerke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Elizabeth Spencer’s novel is not dated, even if her way of reporting the world belongs to an era where both the vision (a certain type of cinematic perspective) and the language (a distillation of Hemingwayesque, 40s-movie noir) show rather than tell. One example of “telling” in contemporary fiction is the use a close third-person to articulate the thoughts and emotions of the novel’s characters. Spencer is unwilling to do this, and the closest she comes to verbalizing/articulating thoughts is by describing the images that come to mind in both the protagonist Duncan Harper and his former fiance, Marcia Mae. There is no psychologizing and no verbalizing, which implies that people rarely find a summative verbal construct for their thoughts/feelings, that they are their actions before they invent their motivations/reasons. This approach to defining character results in a spare and “hard-boiled” determinism where characters end up quashed by social forces.

The Voice at the Back door is set in 1952 Alabama, where in the small town of Lacey, Blacks are kept from the polls and President Truman’s 1948 statement of civil rights is anathema. Mixed in with the post-Reconstruction segregation are matters of gambling and politics, terrain that is similarly covered in Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, where demagoguery, social climbing, money, and low cunning become elevated themes in his torrid Southern hothouse prose. Spencer’s leaner prose objectively covers more moral ground than Warren does, as the “Negro question” is only tangential to Warren’s concern with politics and power. In this respect, The Voice at the Back Door is kin to Lee Harper’s To Kill a Mockingbird, though Spencer portrays the Blacks in Lacey as no less perversely distorted by segregation and racism than are its white citizens. Spencer eschews articulating the perverse and twisted logic that sustains racism in Faulknerian terms of blood, history, and festering grievances, and she instead puts on display in one episode in this novel a Black mother lashing her son to better teach him how to be a proper ���nigger”.

The Voice at the Back Door is a snapshot of a time and place, a record of how people behaved inside an overtly racist society. While Spencer intimates that changes are imminent—looming in Federal forces that will amend States’ rights to perpetuate racist policies—she employs social determinism to show what happens to people who no longer go along to get along. What remains fascinating in looking at this novel and comparing it to contemporary philosophical/psychological/sociological critiques of racism is Spencer’s implication that action/behavior cannot really be understood, that feelings and motivations are just so many rival fictions we construct after the (f)act.

[Gary Lindsay · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book may be hard to find, but it's definitely worth the trouble. I came across the title via my Pulitzer reading club. After finishing the list of winners, they are looking at "near misses." This was a finalist in 1954 but no award was made that year.

Set in the Mississippi hill country in contemporary times (1950s), the story centers around Duncan Harper, a former football star who achieved natural acclaim, after he has returned to his home town to run a grocery store. When a popular sheriff lay dying of a heart attack, Duncan is his choice to succeed him. What follows is the action leading up the election where Duncan faces his deputy, and the major issue is the "negro question." The book is unflinching in its portrayal of Jim Crow era race relations. At times, the plot moves slowly while the author fleshes out background we need of the characters so we can appreciate what drives them to act as the do. The characters were plentiful, but each has a key role in the story and I left the book with the feeling that I came to know everyone in this rural area as well as they all knew each other. Maybe better.

I'd love to lead a book club discussion of this, hopefully involving some who think racism is no longer a part of our American culture. Seeing racism in this, its rawest form can help up recognize it in its more subtle expressions today.

[Sandy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Set in a fictional small town in Mississippi in the Mid-50's the story centers around Duncan Harper. Duncan is a local football hero and a reluctant sheriff, appointed after the long time sheriff dies. Duncan's plan is to shut down the bootlegging in their dry county and treat blacks equally before the law. Neither of these positions bodes well for his re-election and do not endear him to some long time friends and family members.
The book is well-written and, I think, captures the relationships and speech of the time and place quite well. The racial divide made for hard reading at times.

[Bob Entwistle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Write a book that essentially lays out the struggle for racial equality in Mississippi and foretells what will occur over the next decade (or several decades) and the nerves may be too exposed for some. According to one view "The book was unanimously chosen by the Pulitzer jurors, but the governing committee chose to give no prize in 1957. Spencer's candor about virulent segregationist racism is sometimes cited as the reason her award was withheld."

No excuse for this not to be seen as a classic American novel at this point though!

[Patrick Viale · Rating 4 out of 5]

While the language is certainly not politically correct for our times, Spencer's book captured very vividly and accurately the atmosphere of racial tension in Mississippi in the 1950s. What worked less well was the lack of consistency in the portrayal of some of her characters - from one chapter to the next they seem to have changed outlook and sometimes, personality. An unusual book well worth reading.

[Jan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another classic book that has been with me since 1982. It is an important book and preceded "To Kill A Mockingbird" but did not receive the same amount of attention. I suspect it's due to the rough edges, language, and no children to really soften the narrative. A fair amount of politics and underhandedness was also involved.

[Heidi Thorsen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Written in 1956, this book is still relevant in 2021. It describes the life of five friends and their families in a small town in Mississippi. Race, politics, crime, passion, this book has it all, and is wonderfully evocative. I won't spoil it by revealing the plot, but highly recommend it. The best book I've read so far this year.

[Hal · Rating 3 out of 5]

On the plus side, if you want a trustworthy depiction of race relations in Mississippi in the 50s, it's good to have an author living in Mississippi in the 50s. Likewise, I presume the dialects are accurate, though they seem otherwise. On the other side, this novel filled with racists and love triangles is just ok for me.

[Joe Walton · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a tale that takes place in a small town in Mississippi in the 1920's. I was transported there and experienced the racial tensions, the politics and the battle over alcohol. It was interesting but I lost interest in the story line and left town on page 203, never to return.

[Deborah Bluminberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Published in 1956, votes as winner of Pulitzer for that year but denied by the Pulitzer board. Mississippi small town live in 1952, has politics, family drama, scandal, and the prevailing and overwhelming racism of the time.

[Betty Utley · Rating 2 out of 5]

Weirdly not a great match for me. I’m surprised and imagining it is my current restlessness creating the reaction.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting and sad picture of Mississippi in the early fifties, excellent writing.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure that portrait has changed as much as I might like to think.

[Mary Coker]

Just happened to find this Mississippi Arthor, Elizabeth Spencer! I really think she was before her time in writing this book and if you happen to read it you will see why. A very good book.

[Cordelia Biddle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Riveting. Terrifying. Racism in all its raw brutality. Extraordinary writing and perfectly crafted. I cannot recommend this highly enough.