The Voice at the Back Door - Softcover

Spencer, Elizabeth

3.98

249 ratings by Goodreads

9780380701049: The Voice at the Back Door

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0380701049 ISBN 13: 9780380701049

Publisher: Avon Books, 1986

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Racial tensions erupt when a citizen with a deep sense of justice becomes sheriff of a Southern town

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Review:

"[Spencer's] finest work to date.... Technically brilliant... artistically persuasive." -- New York Times

"Spencer has written a powerful, moving and true novel of the modern South, a novel that will contribute much pleasure and understanding." -- New York Times Book Review

"No two ways about it -- The Voice at the Back Door is a practically perfect novel." -- The New Yorker

From the Back Cover:

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.

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