Carson McCullers

Born Lula Carson Smith on February 19, 1917, in Columbus, Georgia, the daughter of a jeweler and a mother who believed from birth that her child was destined for greatness, McCullers trained as a pianist and at seventeen sailed from Savannah to New York to study at Juilliard, only to lose her tuition money, by her account, on the subway, and never attend a single class. She enrolled instead in writing courses at Columbia, married the aspiring writer Reeves McCullers in 1937, and at twenty-three published The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), a novel about loneliness in a small Southern town that made her instantly famous. Reflections in a Golden Eye followed in 1941, and The Member of the Wedding (1946) became her most beloved work, later a Broadway hit. Her life was devastated by illness: rheumatic fever in adolescence led to a series of strokes that left her partially paralyzed on her left side before she was thirty. She and Reeves divorced, remarried, and divorced again; he killed himself in 1953 with an overdose of barbiturates, having first tried to persuade her to join him in a double suicide. She spent her final years in Nyack, New York, typing with one hand, drinking heavily, and producing The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1951) and Clock Without Hands (1961). She suffered a final stroke in August 1967 and died on September 29, at fifty.

In October 1940, weeks after The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter made her famous at twenty-three, McCullers moved into a decaying Brooklyn Heights brownstone that the editor George Davis was filling with artists. W.H. Auden took the master bedroom, Gypsy Rose Lee wrote her mystery novel down the hall, and Benjamin Britten composed downstairs, all under one improbable roof.