Born: 19 July 1921, United States
Died: 22 December 2019
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women creator Allison Tyra’s book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.
Overlooking Ida B. Wells could be seen as an oversight, but a clear and deliberate choice was made in 1957. The Pulitzer Prize advisory board chose not to give that year’s award for fiction to anyone, rather than give it to Elizabeth Spencer. The jury had unanimously voted that the prize be awarded to Spencer for her third novel, The Voice at the Back Door, a critique of local corruption and racial violence in Mississippi. Though no public reason was given, critics have asserted that it was a political decision, given her candour about racism at the time. Her career suffered because, as all of her books had been set in Mississippi, she was seen as a “Southern woman” writer rather than a literary author, and she didn’t publish another book until 1965. It seems indisputable that a Pulitzer would have changed such a perception.