Biography

 of

Carson McCullers

    Carson McCullers was born Carson Smith in 1917, in Columbia, Georgia. She went to Columbia and New York Universities and at the Julliard in the mid1930’s. She later would marry James Reeves McCullers in 1938, who was a corporal in the U.S. Army. They soon divorce, but they reconcile and remarry in 1955.

In 1940, when she was twenty-three years old, she published her first novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, the book told the sad stories of the lonely people living in a small Southern town during the Depression. The Member of the Wedding (1946), was written as a play in the 1950’s. The novel won the New York Critics Award. McCullers also wrote several short stories. Most of McCullers's writing focused on lonely, disconnected people who tried to find themselves. Almost all of her work was set in the South.

McCullers was a fragile person and began to suffer from strokes. When she was thirty- one, the left side of her body had been paralyzed. There was even a period during which she could only use one finger to type. After their second marriage, her husband killed himself. During the last years of her life, she was unable to even sit at a desk to work. She died in 1967, at the age of fifty.