Carson McCullers (1917-1967) was the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, The Member of the Wedding, Reflections in a Golden Eye, and Clock Without Hands. Born in Columbus, Georgia, on February 19, 1917, she became a promising pianist and enrolled in the Juilliard School of Music in New York when she was seventeen, but lacking money for tuition, she never attended classes. Instead she studied writing at Columbia University, which ultimately led to The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, the novel that made her an overnight literary sensation. On September 29, 1967, at age fifty, she died in Nyack, New York, where she is buried.

Biography

Carson McCullers, novelist, short story writer, and playwright, was born Lula Carson Smith on February 19, 1917, in Columbus, Georgia, the daughter of Lamar Smith, a jewelry storeowner, and Vera Marguerite Waters. Best known for her novels The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, The Ballad of the Sad Café, Reflections in a Golden Eye, and The Member of the Wedding, McCullers also won awards for her adaptation of The Member of the Wedding for the Broadway stage. After completing high school, Carson studied for two years in New York before marrying James Reeves McCullers and moving to New York permanently upon the publication of her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, in 1940 when McCullers was only 23.

Heralded as a wunderkind by critics, McCullers' most significant was published between 1943 and 1950. Plagued by a series of strokes attributed to a mis-diagnosed and untreated case of childhood rheumatic fever, McCullers died at age fifty in 1967. With a collection of work including five novels, two plays, twenty short stories, over two dozen nonfiction pieces, a book of children's verses, a small number of poems, and an unfinished autobiography, McCullers is considered among the most significant American writers of the twentieth-century.

Author biography courtesy of The Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians at Columbus State University, Columbus, GA.

When she was only twenty-three, CarsonMcCullers's first novel created a literary sensation. Shewas very special, one of America's superlativewriters who conjures up a vision of existence asterrible as it is real, who takes us on shatteringvoyages into the depths of the spiritual isolationthat underlies the human condition. This novel isthe work of a supreme artist, Carson McCullers'senduring masterpiece. The heroine is the strangeyoung girl, Mick Kelly. The setting is a smallSouthern town, the cosmos universal and eternal.The characters are the damned, the voiceless, therejected. Some fight their loneliness withviolence and depravity, Some with sex or drink, and some-- like Mick -- with a quiet, intensely personalsearch for beauty.

From the Paperback edition.