Carson McCullers Biography and List of Works

American author whose psychological novels and stories depict the secrets of lonely people. Many of her works are set in the South. McCuller's best known novels are THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER 1940), written with realistic and symbolic variations on the theme of human loneliness and REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE (1942), a psychological horror story set in a military base. THE MEMBER OF THE WEDDING (1946) described the loneliness of a young girl at her brother's wedding. The Broadway production of the novel had a successful run in 1950-51.

"I first met Carson McCullers during the war when I was visiting Paulette Goddard and Burgess Meredith in upstate New York. 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 series of strokes that made her an invalid before she was thirty. 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 affections multiplied, she only grew stronger."
(John Huston in An Open Book, 1980)

McCullers was born in Columbus, Georgia, as the daughter of a well-to-do watchmaker and jeweller of French Hugenot extraction. From the age of five she took piano lessons. At the age of seventeen she moved to New York to study piano at Juilliard School of Music, but never attended the school - she managed to lose the money set aside for her tuition. McCullers worked in menial jobs and devoted herself to writing. She studied creative writing at Columbia and New York universities and published in 1936 an autobiographical piece, 'Wunderkind' in Story magazine. It depicted a musical prodigy's failure and adolescent insecurity.

In 1937 she married Reeves McCullers. They moved to North Caroline, living there for two years. During this time she wrote The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, a novel in the Southern Gothic tradition. It was set in the 1930s in a small Georgian mill town. The central characters are an adolescent girl with a passion to study music, an unsuccessful socialist agitator, a black physician struggling to maintain his personal dignity, a widower who owns a café, and John Singer, the deaf-mute protagonist. He is the confidante of people who talk to him about loneliness and misery. When Singer's Greek mute friend goes insane, Singer is left alone. He takes a room with the Kelly family, where he is visited by the town's misfits. After discovering that his mute friend has died, Singer shoots himself - there is no one left to communicate with him.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter was well received when it came out, and it was interpreted as an anti-fascist book. In 1968 it was filmed 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.

McCullers's marriage turned out to be unlucky. They both had homosexual relationships and separated in 1940. She moved to New York to live with George Davis, the editor of Harper's Bazaar. McCullers became a member of the art commune February House in Brooklyn. Among their friends were W.H. Auden, Paul and Jane Bowles, and the striptease artiste Gipsy Rose Lee. After World War II McCullers lived mostly in Paris. Her close friends during these years included Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams.

In 1945 McCullers remarried with Reeves, and in 1948 under depression she attempted suicide. Reeves killed himself in a Paris hotel in 1953 with an overdose of sleeping pills. McCullers's bitter-sweet play THE SQUARE ROOT OF WONDERFUL (1958) was an attempt to examine these traumatic experiences.

Carson McCullers suffered throughout her life from several illnesses. She died in New York on September 29, 1967, after a stroke and a resultant brain haemorrhage. Although her oeuvre is often described as 'Southern Gothic', McCullers wrote her novels after leaving the South. All her novels were written with elegant, plain style. In the grotesque world of McCullers's fiction her eccentric characters suffer from loneliness that she interpreted with deep empathy. In a discussion with the Irish critic and writer Terence De Vere White she confessed: "Writing, for me, is a search for God."

For further reading: Critical Essays on Carson McCullers, ed. by Beverly Lyon Clark et al (1996); Wunderkind: The Reputation of Carson McCullers, 1940-1990 by Judith Giblin James (1995) ; Understanding Carson McCullers by V.S. Carr (1989); Carson McCullers, ed by H. Bloom (1986); Carson McCullers by M.B. McDowell (1980); The Lonely Hunter by Virginia Spencer Carr (1975); Carson McCullers by R.M. Cook (1975); Carson McCullers by D. Edmonds (1969): Carson McCullers by L. Graver (1969)

THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER, (1940)
REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE, (1941)