Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers (February 19, 1917 – September 29, 1967) was an American writer of novels, short stories, plays, essays and poetry. Her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, explores the spiritual isolation of misfits and outcasts of the U.S. South. Her other novels have similar themes and are all set in the South.

Early life and education
She was born Lula Carson Smith  in Columbus, Georgia, in 1917. Her mother was the granddaughter of a plantation owner and Confederate war hero. Her father, like Wilbur Kelly in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, was a watchmaker and jeweler of French Huguenot descent. From the age of ten, Lula took piano lessons. When she was fifteen, her father gave her a typewriter on which to compose stories.

Smith graduated from Columbus High School. In September 1934 at the age of 17, she left home on a steamship from Savannah, Georgia, planning to study piano at the Juilliard School of Music in New York City. She changed her mind about studying to be a concert pianist upon her return to Columbus as she was ill with rheumatic fever. McCullers worked in menial jobs and studied creative writing under the Texas writer Dorothy Scarborough at night classes at Columbia University, and with Sylvia Chatfield Bates at Washington Square College of New York University. In 1936 she published her first work. "Wunderkind", an autobiographical piece which Bates had much admired, appeared in Story magazine. It depicted a musical prodigy's failure and adolescent insecurity. It is also collected in the The Ballad of the Sad Cafe.

Marriage
From 1935 to 1937 she divided her time, as her studies and health dictated, between Columbus and New York. In September 1937 she married an ex-soldier and aspiring writer, Reeves McCullers. They began their married life in Charlotte, North Carolina, where Reeves had found work.

Career
Maxim Lieber served as her literary agent in 1938, 1941, and from 1948 to 1949. In Charlotte and Fayetteville, North Carolina, McCullers completed her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, written in the Southern Gothic or perhaps Southern realist traditions. Suggested by McCullers's editor, the title was taken from Fiona MacLeod's poem "The Lonely Hunter". The novel was thought to be anti-Fascist at the time.

McCullers published eight books. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), which she wrote at the age of 23; Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941); and The Member of the Wedding (1946) are the best known. The novella The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951) depicts loneliness and the pain of unrequited love. At the time of its writing, McCullers was a resident at Yaddo, the artists' colony in Saratoga, New York.

Many know her works only by their film adaptations. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was adapted as a film with the same title in 1968 with Alan Arkin in the lead role. Reflections in a Golden Eye was directed by John Huston (1967) and starred Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor. "I first met Carson McCullers during the war when I was visiting Paulette Goddard and Burgess Meredith in upstate New York," said Huston in his autobiography An Open Book (1980). "Carson lived nearby, and one day when Buzz and I were out for a walk she hailed us from her doorway. She was then in her early 20s, and had already suffered the first of a series of strokes. I remember her as a fragile thing with great shining eyes, and a tremor in her hand as she placed it in mine. It wasn't palsy, rather a quiver of animal timidity. But there was nothing timid or frail about the manner in which Carson McCullers faced life. And as her afflictions multiplied, she only grew stronger."

Divorce and emotional struggles
Carson and Reeves McCullers separated in 1940 and divorced in 1941. After separating from Reeves, she moved to New York to live with George Davis, the editor of Harper's Bazaar. In Brooklyn, she became a member of the art commune February House. Among her friends were W. H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Gypsy Rose Lee, and Paul and Jane Bowles. After World War II, Carson lived mostly in Paris. Her close friends during these years included Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams.

In 1945, Carson and Reeves McCullers remarried. Three years later, under the spell of depression, she attempted suicide. In 1953, Reeves tried to convince her to commit suicide with him, but she fled and Reeves killed himself in their Paris hotel with an overdose of sleeping pills. Her bittersweet play, The Square Root of Wonderful (1957), drew upon these traumatic experiences.

The Member of the Wedding (1946) describes the feelings of a young girl at her brother's wedding. The Broadway stage adaptation of the novel had a successful run in 1950–51 and was produced by the Young Vic in London in September 2007.

McCullers suffered throughout her life from several illnesses and from alcoholism. She also contracted rheumatic fever at the age of 15 and suffered from strokes that began in her youth. By the age of 31, her left side was entirely paralyzed. She died in Nyack, New York, on September 29, 1967, after a brain hemorrhage, and was buried in Oak Hill Cemetery.

McCullers dictated her unfinished autobiography, Illumination and Night Glare (1999), during the final months of her life. Her home from 1945 to 1967 was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2006.

Criticism

 * "Mrs. McCullers and perhaps Mr. Faulkner are the only writers since the death of D. H. Lawrence with an original poetic sensibility. I prefer Mrs. McCullers to Mr. Faulkner because she writes more clearly; I prefer her to D. H. Lawrence because she has no message." – Graham Greene


 * "[Her work is] one of the few satisfying achievements of our second-rate culture." – Gore Vidal


 * "Moving, yes, but a minor author. And broken by illness at such a young age." – Arthur Miller


 * "Carson's major theme; the huge importance and nearly insoluble problems of human love." – Tennessee Williams.

Although McCullers's oeuvre is often described as "Southern Gothic," she produced her famous works after leaving the South. Her eccentric characters suffer from loneliness that is interpreted with deep empathy. In a discussion with the Irish critic and writer Terence de Vere White she said: "Writing, for me, is a search for God." Other critics have variously detected tragicomic or political elements in her writing.

Novels

 * The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940)
 * Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941)
 * The Member of the Wedding (1946)
 * Clock Without Hands (1961)

Other works

 * The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951), a short story collection comprising:
 * a novella of the same title, later made into a Merchant Ivory film
 * "Wunderkind" – (Story, 1936)
 * "The Jockey" – (The New Yorker, 1941)
 * "Madame Zilensky and the King of Finland" – (The New Yorker, 1941)
 * "The Sojourner" – (Mademoiselle, 1950)
 * "A Domestic Dilemma" – (New York Post magazine section, September 16, 1951)
 * "A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud" – (Harper's Bazaar, 1942)
 * The Square Root of Wonderful (1958), a play
 * Sweet as a Pickle and Clean as a Pig (1964), a collection of poems
 * The Mortgaged Heart (1972), a posthumous collection of writings, edited by her sister Rita
 * Illumination and Night Glare (1999), her unfinished autobiography, published more than 30 years after her death

Collections

 * Complete Novels, Carlos L. Dews, ed. (New York: The Library of America, 2001) ISBN 978-1-931082-03-7.