Carson Mccullers

Carson McCullers was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia. She dreamed of becoming a concert pianist, though she had been writing since the age of sixteen, and music left a clear mark on her work. As a child she said she had been "born a man." Mary Dearborn's biography follows her from that Georgia childhood to her sudden fame, and it is the first major biography of her in more than twenty years. At twenty, McCullers married Reeves McCullers, a fellow southerner, ex-soldier and aspiring writer. Their marriage was fraught and tumultuous, lasting twelve years and ending with his suicide in 1953. Reeves was devoted to her and to her writing, yet he envied her talent. She, meanwhile, craved attention, especially from women who admired her but turned down her sexual advances. Her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, came out in 1940, when she was twenty-three, and almost overnight she became the most talked-about writer of her time. Her literary reputation has lasted, but her private life has stayed enigmatic and largely unexamined. Dearborn draws on newly available letters and journals, and on a cache of materials that has surfaced over the past decade. She uses them to give the first full picture of a complex artist who was decades ahead of her time and who understood and captured the longing of the outcast.