Carson McCullers

Abstract

Lula Carson Smith McCullers (b. 1917–d. 1967), known most commonly as Carson McCullers, was an American novelist, writer of short stories, essayist, playwright, poet, and children’s author, born and raised in Columbus, Georgia, who spent most of her adult life outside the South, primarily in New York City. McCullers left her native region permanently with the publication of her first novel in 1940, when she was only twenty-three years old. Heralded as a wunderkind following the success of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, she went on to write four more novels, Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941), The Member of the Wedding (1946), The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951), and Clock Without Hands (1961). McCullers also found success on the stage with the award-winning production of her first play, The Member of the Wedding (1950), a stage adaptation of her novel, that ran for 501 performances on Broadway. A second play, The Square Root of Wonderful (1958), was not well received by critics and closed after only forty-five performances. McCullers’s work has proven popular for adaptation. With the exception of Clock Without Hands, all her novels have been adapted for the screen and some of her short stories, including “A Domestic Dilemma,” “A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud,” and “The Sojourner,” have been adapted as short films or for television. Due to a misdiagnosed and improperly treated case of childhood rheumatic disease, McCullers was plagued with ill health for most of her life. She had a series of increasingly debilitating strokes beginning in her early twenties that continued and ultimately led to her death on 29 September 1967 at age fifty. McCullers’s legacy seems secure, due in large part to the continued critical and popular interest in her work, especially The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, selected in a 1998 list by the Modern Library as the seventeenth of the one hundred most important 20th-century novels, and by Time magazine as one of the top one hundred novels published between 1923 and 2005. McCullers, elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1952, was a part of a group of writers from the American South seen as the literary representatives of the region in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Critical response to McCullers’s work is characterized by attention to her consideration of adolescence; disability; loneliness and the search for belonging, love, and understanding; gender and sexual identity; racial discrimination and racism; empathy; the outsider; freaks and freakishness; and what many mislabel as the Southern gothic or grotesque aspects of her work.