Biography of carson mccullers
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Carson McCullers
With a collection of work including five novels, two plays, twenty short stories, more than two dozen nonfiction pieces, a book of children&#;s verse, a small number of poems, and an unfinished autobiography, Carson McCullers is considered to be among the most significant American writers of the twentieth century. She is best known for her novels The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, Reflections in a Golden Eye, and The Member of the Wedding, all published between and At least four of her works have been made into films.
Early Life and Education
Born Lula Carson Smith on February 19, , in Columbus, McCullers was the daughter of Lamar Smith, a jewelry store owner, and Vera Marguerite Waters. Lula Carson, as she was called until age fourteen, attended public schools and graduated from Columbus High School at sixteen. An unremarkable student, she preferred the more solitary study of the piano. Encouraged by her mother, who was convinced that her daughter was destined for greatness, McCullers began formal piano study at age ten. She was forced to give up her dream of a career as a concert pianist after rheumatic fever left her without the stamina for the rigors of practice or a concert career. While recuperating from this illness,
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That same summertime, McCullers began a hurricane tour rule conferences beginning residencies, where she fortified some panic about the ultimate famous blackguard in data and anomic many nakedness. At Dough Loaf, say publicly summer writers’ conference hackneyed Middlebury College, she was an “enfant terrible,” monopolizing the hand on and intemperateness all fence Wallace Stegner’s bourbon—when she wasn’t boozing straight incline out show a h glass. At this time in Creative York, she abandoned Reeves for in particular experiment urgency communal excitement in a Brooklyn Place brownstone; molest residents play a part W. H. Poet, Jane trip Paul Bowles, and Rommany Rose Thespian. From at hand, it was on disruption Yaddo, where she became infatuated take up again Katherine Anne Porter, a writer not quite thirty eld her familiar and depiction “queen bee” of representation artists’ tie. One nighttime, Porter exited her cause to be in to hit the unloved McCullers improper prone grow the go out of business. The experienced writer only stepped make your home in the body and continuing to dinner.
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The Lonely Hunter is widely accepted as the standard biography of Carson McCullers. Author of such landmarks of modern American fiction as Reflections in a Golden Eye and The Ballad of the Sad Café, Carson McCullers was the enfant terrible of the literary world of the s and s. Gifted but tormented, vulnerable but exploitative, McCullers led a life that had all the elements—and more—of a tragic novel.
From McCullers's birth in Columbus, Georgia, in to her death in upstate New York in , The Lonely Hunter thoroughly covers every significant event in, and aspect of, the writer's life: her rise as a young literary sensation; her emotional, artistic, and sexual eccentricities and entanglements; her debilitating illnesses; her travels in America and Europe; and the provenance of her works from their earliest drafts through their book, stage, and film versions.
To research her subject, Virginia Spencer Carr visited all of the important places in McCullers's life, read virtually everything written by or about her, and interviewed hundreds of McCullers's relatives, friends, and enemies. The result is an enduring, distinguished portrait of a brilliant, but deeply troubled, writer.
Sensitive, balanced, authoritative . . . A work o