Introduction


Carson McCullers
Lula Carson Smith, better known as Carson McCullers, could not hold a job. “I was always fired,” she once told an interviewer. “My record is perfect on that. I never quit a job in my life.” But that did not hurt her real career at all. McCullers burst onto the literary scene in 1940 with her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. She went on to write The Ballad of the Sad Café and The Member of the Wedding, among other well-received works. Her writing is marked by tragedy and Southern gothic themes along the lines of Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor.

Essential Facts

  1. McCullers began her creative life as a piano protege and enrolled at Julliard at the age of 17. During her time there, she was ill and never went to class.
  2. The Member of the Wedding is McCullers most famous work. It was adapted for the stage in 1950 and into a 1952 film starring Julie Harris.
  3. McCullers often explored homosexual themes in her novels. In fact, her own marriage ended when she took a female lover and her husband took a male lover.
  4. In 1953, her husband, whom she had divorced and remarried, tried to get her to commit suicide with him. She fled and he killed himself in their Paris hotel room.
  5. McCullers health was always poor, and she died of a stroke at the age of 50.