User:MedCircus/Novelist Elizabeth Savage

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'' Elizabeth Savage (née Fitzgerald 15 February 1918 – 15 July 1989) was an American novelist. Her nine novels capture the changing lives of girls and women from the turbulent 1930s to the 1980s. Her characters are influenced by the Great Depression, World War II, the birth of the women’s movement, the Sixties counterculture and the Vietnam War. Among her best-known books are “The Last Night at the Ritz,” the semi-autobiographical “The Girls from the Five Great Valleys," "Summer of Pride," "But Not for Love,” "A Fall of Angels,” and "Happy Ending."

“Elizabeth Savage paints portraits of women of the thirties, some of them along in years, having lived over half their lives in the 1800s, some in mid-life, and some just at the brink of womanhood, trying to decide if they want to be ‘better women,’” writes Sue Hart, an English professor at Montana State University Billings who wrote a monograph on Thomas and Elizabeth Savage for the Boise State University Western Writers Series.

Savage was married for 50 years to the novelist Thomas Savage, with whom she had three children. Called “Betty” by family and friends, she was a keen observer of male/female relationships, and her novels often feature strong, enduring female friendships. She was also known for her sense of place. Of her nine novels, three are centered in the American West, where she spent much of her childhood. Others are set in Maine, where she lived nearly all of her adulthood,

Early life
Born in Hingham, Massachusetts, Elizabeth Savage was the daughter of Mildred Ridlon and Brassil Fitzgerald. Her father was an English professor and freelance writer. She called him “a harbinger of this peripatetic century; he attended Boston College, the University of Arizona and Stanford before he taught first at Utah and then Montana. So I grew up thinking of myself primarily as a westerner and was not surprised to marry one—although we met in the east.”

After graduating from Missoula County High School in Missoula, Montana, Savage entered Colby College, Waterville, Maine, in 1937. That summer, she began exchanging letters with “a friend of a friend,” the young man who would become her husband. Thomas (then known as Thomas Brenner), was from Horse Prairie, Montana. Although he had been a student of her father’s at the University of Montana, Missoula, he had never met Elizabeth. After months of writing, he hopped on a Greyhound bus and traveled from Montana to Boston, where he did meether and her mother at the Copley Plaza Hotel, a scene she later fictionalized in her most high-profile novel, The Last Night at the Ritz. She took off her glasses, Thomas remembered, only "to be more beautiful."

After that, Thomas decied enroll in Colby College. The couple married in 1939, while still students, and received B.A. degrees in 1940. [3][4] She graduated Magna Cum Laude. The Savages lived in Chicago, Montana and Massachusetts before settling down in Maine, their home for the next thirty years.

“That thirty-year period was a productive one for the Savages; they each published nine novels during their time on the Atlantic coast.” writes Hart. In 1985, they moved to Whidbey Island, Washington, where Thomas had a sister. Elizabeth died there in 1989 at 71 years old.

Writing career
Savage wrote her first novel, “Lacquer Lady” at the age of 10, featuring not only a “sophisticated young woman who wore black abut also “Binky,” an older man of 18.” She won a National Scholastic prize for “the Master in the House, a one-act play set in Hingham, her birthplace. It was later published by Samuel French. Writing career. Savage published his first story, "The Bronc Stomper", in 1937 in Coronet under the name Tom Brenner. Annie Proulx has noted that the story was "unremarkable except for its unusual subject matter", breaking a horse.[2] His last novel, The Corner of Rife and Pacific, was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award[8] and received the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award in 1989. When asked to speak of his influences, Savage stated "Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell, is one of the best novels I ever read. I was influenced by John Steinbeck, Robert Benchley, and Dorothy Parker. I was a history major, read little fiction, chiefly biography and history. I read S.J. Perelman."[9]

Years after her death, her books (like Thomas’s) when The Last Night at the Ritz became one of Nancy Pearl's Book Lust Rediscoveries) in 2012. . She also rescued The Girls From the Five Great Valleys in 2014.

Novels

 * Summer of Pride (Boston: Little, 1960)
 * But Not for Love (Boston: Little, 1970)
 * A Fall of Angels (Boston: Little, 1971)
 * Happy Ending (Boston: Little, 1972)}}
 * The Last Night at the Ritz (Boston: Little, 1973)
 * A Good Confession. (Boston: Little, 1975)
 * The Girls from the Five Great Valleys. (Boston: Little, 1978)
 * Willowwood: A Novel about Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddal. (Boston: Little, 1978)
 * Toward the End. (Boston: Little, 1980).

Categories
Category:1918 births Category:American Novelists Category:20th-century women writers Category:Western Fiction Writers Category:Women Writers Category:American Women Writers Category:American Women Novelists Category:Colby College alumni Category:20th Century Novelists

, MedCircus (talk) 17:04, 4 April 2017 (UTC)