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'' Elizabeth Savage (née Fitzgerald 15 February 1918 – 15 July 1989) was an American novelist. Her nine novels capture the rapidly changing lives of women and men in the turbulent decades between the 1930s and the 1980s, drawing upon her own experiences in the Western United States and the Atlantic Coast. This time period spans 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."

Called “Betty” by family and friends, Savage was married for 50 years to the novelist Thomas Savage, with whom she had three children. She was a keen observer of male/female relationships and a chronicler of strong, enduring female friendships. A powerful sense of place typifies her work. Of Savage's nine novels, three are centered in the American West, where she spent much of her childhood. Others are set in Maine, where she lived most 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. “He was a harbinger of this peripatetic century;” she once said. “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 enrolled in 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 letters, he hopped on a Greyhound bus and traveled from Montana to Boston, where he met his future wife and her mother at the Copley Plaza Hotel, a scene she later fictionalized in her best-known novel, The Last Night at the Ritz.

Afterwards, Thomas joined Elizabeth at 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. Both Savages had big careers literary careers.

“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 recently discovered sister. Elizabeth died there in 1989. She was 71 years old. ref>Hart, Sue (1995) Thomas and Elizabeth Savage, Western Writers Series, Boise State University, Boise Idaho.

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. ref>Hart, Sue (1995) Thomas and Elizabeth Savage, Western Writers Series, Boise State University, Boise Idaho.

When her children were little, Savage wrote mainly poetry. She also sold a story based on her husband’s grandmother, known as the “Sheep Queen of Idaho,” to the Saturday Evening Post for $1,000—a princely sum at the time. She did not publish her first novel, Summer of Pride, until 1960, when she was 42 years old. The second novel, Not for Love, came ten year later. ”But once she was freed up, she wrote quite rapidly," said her husband. Seven novels followed, sometimes one a year. She also wrote for magazines. Her last work has a prophetic name, Toward the End. She died nine years after its publication in 1989.

In 2012, Nancy Pearl sparked new interest in Savage's work when The Last Night at the Ritz became a Nancy Pearl's Book Lust Rediscoveries imprint. A line from the novel had been a favorite of Pearl's for many years. "It is very dangerous to get caught without something to read." Pearl notes that Last Night In the Ritz is set in the Mad Man era and "there's a lot of drink, everyone smokes (cigarettes) and fornication, not to say adultery, is hardly an unknown event."

The Girls From the Five Great Valleys also became a Book Lust Rediscoveries in 2014. The main themes, writes Pearl, are chance and "the terrible inexorabiltiy of change (which occurs whether we want it to or not)."

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
American Novelists 20th Century Novelists Western Fiction Writers Women Writers 20th-Century Women Writers American Women Writers American Women Novelists Colby College alumni Category:1918 births ,