Carson McCullers
A Life
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
The first major biography in more than twenty years of one of America’s greatest writers, based on newly available letters and journals
V. S. Pritchett called her “a genius.” Gore Vidal described her as a “beloved novelist of singular brilliance . . . Of all the Southern writers, she is the most apt to endure . . .” And Tennessee Williams said, “The only real writer the South ever turned out, was Carson.”
She was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia. Her dream was to become a concert pianist, though she’d been writing since she was sixteen and the influence of music was evident throughout her work. As a child, she said she’d been “born a man.” At twenty, she married Reeves McCullers, a fellow southerner, ex-soldier, and aspiring writer (“He was the best-looking man I had ever seen”). They had a fraught, tumultuous marriage lasting twelve years and ending with his suicide in 1953. Reeves was devoted to her and to her writing, and he envied her talent; she yearned for attention, mostly from women who admired her but rebuffed her sexually. Her first novel—The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter—was published in 1940, when she was twenty-three, and overnight, Carson McCullers became the most widely talked about writer of the time.
While McCullers’s literary stature continues to endure, her private life has remained enigmatic and largely unexamined. Now, with unprecedented access to the cache of materials that has surfaced in the past decade, Mary Dearborn gives us the first full picture of this brilliant, complex artist who was decades ahead of her time, a writer who understood—and captured—the heart and longing of the outcast.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Biographer Dearborn (Ernest Hemingway) delivers a penetrating portrait of Southern novelist Carson McCullers (1917–1967) as a brilliant but difficult writer whose life was marred by alcoholism and illness, which began with an untreated strep throat infection she contracted sometime before age 20 that precipitated a series of strokes throughout her life. Dearborn describes how McCullers's mother believed her daughter was destined for greatness even before she was born, a prophecy that came true after McCullers's first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, was released to critical acclaim when she was just 23. Calling queerness "Carson's defining trait as an artist," Dearborn delves into McCullers's tumultuous romantic life, which included getting married at age 19 to Reeve McCullers, with whom she maintained an on-and-off relationship as she pursued "older, more worldly women who sometimes returned her affection but who... seldom wanted the passionate physical relationship she sought." Dearborn provides astute psychological insight into McCullers, describing her as a headstrong if "needy" writer who demanded "constant expressions of love," and offers a tender depiction of her close friendship with Tennessee Williams, whom she met after he wrote her a letter of admiration and who helped take care of her after her second stroke left her partially paralyzed. This skillful biography satisfies. Photos.
