Carson McCullers, the self-described "holy terror" of the literary world, was born Lula Carson Smith on February 19, 1917 in Columbus, Georgia to Lamar Smith and his wife Vera Waters. At fourteen, she dropped the "Lula" and would be known as Carson both professionally and personally for the rest of her life.

Her mother had thought that she would be a great pianist and so McCullers took lessons beginning at ten. She had been a sickly child, suffering from pernicious anemia and pleurisy. During her recovery from a bout with rheumatic fever, she started to read compulsively and to consider a career as a writer. At seventeen, she sailed to New York City to attend Julliard but she studied writing at Columbia University and Washington Square College of New York instead.

McCullers, who would be constantly plagued with ill health, returned to Georgia in 1936 to recover from a respiratory condition. While bedridden, she started her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (which would be filmed in 1968). The following year, she married James Reeves McCullers, Jr., (''the best-looking man I had ever seen") who had been stationed with the army at Fort Benning. It was a tumultuous union full of jealousy, both professional (Reeves envied her writing ability) and sexual. The pair would divorce in 1942 when she discovered he was forging her checks. They remarried in 1945, with lots of separations and reconciliations. Nothing, it seems, was simple in her life. It was said that her greatest love was a bi-polar woman and sometimes McCullers would fall in love with a man and a woman at the same time. Later, composer David Diamond would write about his ménage a trois with Reeves and McCullers.

A few months after her marriage, McCullers submitted six chapters and an outline of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter to the publishing house Houghton Mifflin. They offered her a contract and an advance of $500. The book, about the lonely inhabitants of a Southern town and the deaf mute they encounter gained her immediate success. Rose Feld wrote in her The New York Times book review, "No matter what the age of its author, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter would be a remarkable book. When one reads that Carson McCullers is a girl of 22 it becomes more than that. Maturity does not cover the quality of her work. It is something beyond that, something more akin to the vocation of pain to which a great poet is born." McCullers would later write that she was "much too young to understand what happened to me or the responsibility it entailed."

During one of her frequent separations from Reeves, she moved to New York and became part of the gay Southern group who wrote for Harpers Bazaar. Her friends included Truman Capote, Paul Bowles and Tennessee Williams. Her second novel, Reflections in a Golden Eye was published in Harpers in October and November of 1940. Houghton Mifflin published it in book form in 1941. It was not what her audience was expecting - it was a dark novel of repressed homosexuality set on a peacetime army base, inspired by a story her husband told her of a soldier who was arrested for being a voyeur. Of her writing style McCullers later said, "I am so immersed in my characters that their motives are my own. When I write about a thief, I become one; when I write about Captain Penderton, I become a homosexual man. I become the characters I write about and I bless the Latin poet Terence who said 'Nothing human is alien to me.'"

When she and her husband reconciled and moved to a brownstone at 7 Middaugh St. in Brooklyn, their semi-permanent houseguests included W.H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears, Christopher Isherwood, Richard Wright, Aaron Copland, Oliver Smith, Paul and Jane Bowles and Gypsy Rose Lee. Anthologist Louis Untermeyer once wrote of his visit that it was "gay in both sense of the word. Gypsy [Rose Lee] did not strip, but Auden did plenty of teasing." Salvador Dali, Kurt Weill and Leonard Bernstein visited and it seemed, as Denis de Rougemont wrote in, 1941 that "all that was new in America emanated from that house."
One night, while living at the brownstone, Gypsy Rose Lee and McCullers heard a fire siren and ran out to see where the fire was. While running down the street, McCullers grabbed Lee's arm and suddenly blurted out, "Frankie is in love with her brother and the bride, and wants to become a member of the wedding!" Lee looked at her blankly, having no idea what she was talking about. Six years later, it was the plot for The Member of the Wedding, which would be published in 1946, adapted into a highly successful 1950 play and a 1952 film, starring Julie Harris and Ethel Waters. Inspiration could come to McCullers from the most unexpected places. While drinking at a bar with Auden and George Davis, McCullers ''saw and was fascinated by a remarkable couple . . . a woman who was tall and strong as a giantess, and at her heels she had a little hunchback. I just observed them once, and it was not until some weeks later that the illumination of The Ballad of the Sad Café struck me.'' The short story that appeared in Harpers Bazaar would later be made into a film starring Vanessa Redgrave and Keith Carradine in 1991. Carson McCullers' own life, particularly her bisexuality, would influence both The Ballad of the Sad Café and The Member of the Wedding.

After her father's unexpected death in August 1944, McCullers moved with her mother and sister into a house in Nyack, New York. She would spend most of the remainder of her life there. It was not an easy life by any means, and the 1950s and 60s would be the worst. Although Reeves had survived World War II, their marriage had finally fallen apart by the early 1950s. While briefly living with Reeves in Paris in the 1950s, his alcoholism and mental instability had reached a point where he tried to convince McCullers to agree to a suicide pact with him. She immediately fled back to the United States. Reeves remained and took his own life with an overdose of sleeping pills in November 1953.

McCullers' health, never good, had taken a decided turn for the worse. Director John Huston (who would later direct Reflections in a Golden Eye, 1967) spoke of meeting her during World War II. "Carson lived nearby, and one day when Buzz [Burgess Meredith] 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 a series of strokes. 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 afflictions multiplied, she only grew stronger."

By the time she was 31, McCullers had suffered from several more strokes which eventually confined her to a wheelchair. She was paralyzed on one side of her body and spasms in her left hand made typing painful but, incredibly, she continued to write. "Sometimes I think God got me mixed up with Job. But Job never cursed God and neither have I. I carry on." The last ten years of her life would have even tested Job. br>
Edward Albee adapted The Ballad of the Sad Café into a successful Broadway play in 1963, but creatively, Carson McCullers' powers seem to fail with her body. Her 1957 play The Square Root of Wonderful, in which she explored her life with Reeves closed after 45 performances and her last novel, Clock Without Hands (1961) was not a success. When she died, she was working on a personal journal of her life which she hoped would help young writers handle success better than she did. Unable to type, she dictated it to friends and assistants. It was eventually published in 2000.

Carson McCullers suffered a final stroke on August 15, 1967, which left her in a coma for 46 days. She died, at the age of only 50 on September 29, 1967. At the time of her death, filming had begun in Selma, Alabama on The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, which starred Stacy Keach, Cicely Tyson and Leon Bibb. Reflections in a Golden Eye, with Marlon Brando, Elizabeth Taylor and McCullers' friend Julie Harris, was in post-production, and The Member of the Wedding was being readied for a Broadway musical.

by Lorraine LoBianco

SOURCES:
"Carson McCullers Dies at 50 in New York" Miami News 29 Sep 67 Gussow, Mel "In Unfinished Memoirs, Carson McCullers Recalls a Struggle to Write" New York Times 15 Apr 00
Fulford, Robert "Carson McCullers: A Writer Maimed by Pain", Ottawa Citizen 29 Aug 75 Huston, John An Open Book
"Carson McCullers (1917-1967) New Georgia Encyclopedia