The Spencers of Amberson Avenue: A Turn-of-the-Century Memoir

This memoir introduces the family of Charles Hart Spencer and his wife Mary Acheson: seven children born between 1884 and 1895. In a large Victorian house in Shadyside, an affluent Pittsburgh neighborhood, the family begins a middle-class way of life at the turn of the century. Mr. Spencer, who worked—not very happily—for Henry Clay Frick, was one of the growing number of middle-management employees in American industrial cities in the 1880s and 1890s. His income, which supported his family...