Carson McCullers (February 19, 1917 – September 29, 1967) was an American writer. She wrote novels, short stories, and two plays, as well as essays and some poetry. Her first novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter explores the spiritual isolation of misfits and outcasts of the South. Her other novels have similar themes and are all set in the South.
Easton Press Carson McCullers books
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - 1999Franklin Library Carson McCullers books
Collected Short Stories of Carson McCullers - Collected Stories of the World's Greatest Writers - 1982Carson McCullers biography
McCullers was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia in 1917 of middle class parentage. Her mother was the granddaughter of a plantation owner and Confederate War hero. Her father, similar to Wilbur Kelly in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, was a watchmaker, and a jeweler of French Huguenot extraction. From the age of five she took piano lessons, and at the age of 15 she received a typewriter from her father.
In September 1934 at age 17 she left home on a steamship from Savannah, Georgia, planning to study piano at the Juilliard School of Music in New York City, but never attended the school, having lost the money set aside for her tuition. McCullers worked in menial jobs and studied creative writing under Texas writer Dorothy Scarborough at night classes at Columbia University and with Sylvia Chatfield Bates at Washington Square College of New York University. She decided to become a writer and published in 1936 an autobiographical piece, Wunderkind, a piece her course teacher Miss Bates much admired, in Story magazine. It depicted a musical prodigy's failure and adolescent insecurity and also appears in The Ballad of the Sad Cafe collection.
Marriage and career
From 1935 to 1937 she divided her time, as her studies and health dictated, between Columbus and New York and in September 1937 she married an ex-soldier and aspirant writer, Reeves McCullers. They began their married life in Charlotte, North Carolina where Reeves had found some work. There, and in Fayetteville, North Carolina, she wrote her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, in the Southern Gothic tradition. The title, suggested by McCullers's editor, was taken from Fiona MacLeod's poem 'The Lonely Hunter'. The novel itself was interpreted as an anti-fascist book. Altogether she published eight books. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), written at the age of twenty-three, Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941) and The Member of the Wedding (1946), are the most well-known. The novella The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1951) also depicts loneliness and the pain of unrequited love. She was an alumna of Yaddo in Saratoga, New York.
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was filmed in 1968 with Alan Arkin in the lead role. Reflections in a Golden Eye was directed by John Huston (1967), starring Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor. Some of the film was shot in New York City and on Long Island, where Huston was permitted to use an abandoned Army installation. Many of the interiors and some of the exteriors were done in Italy. "I first met Carson McCullers during the war when I was visiting Paulette Goddard and Burgess Meredith in upstate New York," said Huston in 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 twenties, 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."
Later life
McCullers and Reeves separated in 1940 and divorced in 1941. After she separated 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 their 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, she attempted suicide while depressed. In 1953, Reeves tried to convince her to commit suicide with him, but she fled. After Carson left, Reeves killed himself in their Paris hotel with an overdose of sleeping pills. Her bittersweet play, The Square Root of Wonderful (1957), was an attempt to examine these traumatic experiences. The Member of the Wedding (1946) describes the feelings of a young girl at her brother's wedding. The Broadway production of the novel had a successful run in 1950–51 and was produced by the Young Vic in London in September 2007.
Death
McCullers suffered throughout her life from several illnesses and from alcoholism — she had contracted rheumatic fever at the age of fifteen and suffered from strokes since 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 her final months.
Carson McCullers books in order
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 Cafe (1951 - short story collection)
A novella of the same title, later made into a Merchant Ivory Film
Wunderkind
The Jockey
Madame Zilensky and the King of Finland
The Sourner
A Domestic Dilemma
A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud
The Square Root of Wonderful (play - 1958)
Sweet as a Pickle and Clean as a Pig (poems - 1964)
The Mortgaged Heart (posthumous - 1972)
Illumination and Night Glare (posthumous autobiography - 1999)
Source and additional information: Carson McCullers