Carson McCullers - (1917-1967)
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"WRITING, FOR ME, IS A SEARCH FOR GOD." I. Early life
Carson McCullers was born as Lula Carson Smith on February 19, 1917 in Columbus, Georgia. She was born to a well-respected family of the town, her
great-grandfather was a very prominent slave owner until his cotton stores were burned and his slaves set free during the Civil War. Her father named Lamar Smith was a jeweler.
At the age of six, McCullers discovered her great talent of playing the piano. She is said to have sat down at the piano and with both hands, started playing a song she had heard the
night before. Until late high school, McCullers loved the piano and practiced fervently. However, her dream of a musical education at NewYork Julliard School did not come true.
At seventeen, she was diagnosed with "pneumonia with complications" and during her long recuperation, she took to writing plays, then casting them and performing them for her
family and neighbors. When her mentor and piano teacher died, McCullers put aside her dreams of playing the piano permanently and decided to focus on her newfound talent of writing.
Directly after graduating from high school, McCullers went to New York and registered for creative writing classes. Her health caused her education to be interrupted because
whenever she got sick, she had to be taken south to recuperate. She was recuperating when she met Reeves McCullers who later became her husband on September 20, 1937.
They lived in North Carolina all through the main part of their married lives. In 1940, McCullers returned to New York alone. While she was away from Reeves, she turned to
lesbianism and fell in love with a Swiss novelist named Annemarie Clarec-Schwartenbach. Reeves however, fell in love with another man and left for Rochester, New York. They are
said to have divorced because Reeves took some of McCullers' money. After that, McCullers had many other female lovers, including the famous Katherine Anne Porter, and her family never knew about her lesbianism.
After her many affairs, McCullers' husband wrote her a letter of apology from the European front and begged her to forgive him for his foolish ways. They exchanged letters all
through his stay in Europe during World War II and when he was discharged for a broken wrist, the two remarried in 1945. They stayed in Nyack, with McCullers' mother and later
bought a house in Paris, France. In 1951, McCullers left Reeves and Reeves committed suicide. McCullers then spent the following summer with Tennessee Williams in Key West
but her vacation was cut short when her mother died unexpectedly in 1955. All the rest of her life, McCullers' health suffered. She had surgery for cancer on her right breast as well
as had strokes and other severe illnesses. After a massive cerebral hemorrhage, McCullers lay in a coma until she died on September 29, 1961. II. Publications By Carson McCullers The Heart is a Lonely Hunter The Member of the Wedding The Ballad of the Sad Café Reflections in a Golden Eye III. Awards Received Carson McCullers received: IV. Works Cited
The Carson McCullers Project, 1999, the Miller Group. October 28, 2000
Carson McCullers wrote everything from novels to poems. She wrote approximately sixteen short stories, six novels two plays, eleven poems, and seventeen essays and articles that were published in magazines, such as Vogue
and Mademoiselle.
One of McCullers' more prominent novels, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, is set in her birth
state of Georgia and is about an adolescent young girl who aspired to he a musician, much like Carson McCullers herself. The novel holds a lonely and dreary mood. When it first
came out it was accepted as an anti-fascist book. It was later turned into a movie with Alan Arkin as the lead role.
This story was first written as a novel but later was turned into a play. It was performed on Broadway. It is about the life of a twelve-year-old girl, and is considered one of her most
skillful pieces because of her exquisite control over her characters. The characters are also symbolic of more than themselves
Once called a "grotesque little story" It is one of four of McCullers' most well known works. In this work, McCullers theme of spiritual isolation and the "nature and function of
love" is brought to its fullest, and is considered her saddest.
In this novel McCullers implies that "suffering imposed by isolation is unrelieved by the
possibility of an individual struggle." The world McCullers describes is a desolate world.
The Guggenheim Fiction Fellowship in 1943 for the
Ballad of the Sad Café
Numerous awards for her play The Member of the Wedding
The Henry Bellmann Award and a one thousand-dollar grant
This essay was submitted by a student of Rita Achenbach at Fuquay-Varina High School in Fuquay-Varina, North Carolina.