Recounts the author's youth in Mississippi, travels in Italy, and friendships with such writers as Eudora Welty and Robert Penn Warren 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." Novelist and short story writer Spencer grew up surrounded by the rich literary traditions of the Mississippi hill country, came of age during the renaissance of Southern literature as a genre, and attended Vanderbilt University under the tenure of Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, and Donald Davidson of the New Criticism movement. After the 1948 publication of her first novel, Fire in the Morning, she left for Europe. For the next several decades, she lived in voluntary exile from her native South?mostly in Italy and, after her marriage, in Canada?and finally returned to her roots to teach creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In this gracefully written, sympathetic, yet honest memoir, written in the languid style of Southern storytelling, Spencer appraises life as she lived it, with all its surprise turns, satisfactions, ambitions, frustrations, and regrets. She is best at capturing the complex nature of the places and people that filled her life and influenced her writing. Recommended for comprehensive literature collections and where Spencer has a following.?Denise S. Sticha, Seton Hill Coll. Lib., Greensburg, Pa. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. A literary memoir that's part paean to the golden-age South and part unstinting critique of that region's corrupting segregation and cultural rigidity. Award-winning novelist Spencer (The Night Travellers, 1991, etc.) has led a peripatetic life, traveling widely in Europe and living for many years in Canada. But her hometown of Carrollton, Miss., remains a locus for both memory and fiction. She writes glowingly of a happy childhood in the 1920s and '30s, surrounded by a doting extended family and immersed in the genteel rhythms of plantation life. Early on, she realized the importance (and the constriction) of maintaining appearances in a society where orderliness and prescribed behavior were paramount. Her problems with authority and her budding noncomformity--expressed first in a love of books and writing and later in her support of desegregation--eventually led to estrangement from her father, a businessman who valued commerce above art and racial equality. Spencer's preference for remembering her hometown's nurturing goodness, rather than the flaws that drove her out, is illustrated by her refusal to revisit the decrepit remains of once-grand mansions inhabited by family and friends: ``Where Carrollton is concerned it seems a desecration to recognize that time exists at all.'' She does confront Mississippi's intransigence on race, recounting her horror over the Emmett Till murder and the inseparable divide it opened within her family. Tales of travel in Germany, Italy, France, and England (and her life as a published but impoverished writer in New York) paint a romantic picture of bohemian life. Literary friendships and encounters with Eudora Welty, Saul Bellow, John Cheever, Walker Percy, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and a memorably frosty William Faulkner are detailed in entertaining and vivid thumbnail characterizations. More than simply personal history, Spencer's self-portrait of her literary development dramatically personifies the high price the South paid for driving out its best and brightest. (photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. Landscapes of the Heart is an old-fashioned reminiscence, an elegant, endlessly affectionate evocation of a vanished way of life. -- The New York Times Book Review, Mark Childress Used Book in Good Condition