Carson McCullers was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia,on February 19, 1917. At the age of nineteen she published her first short story,"Wunderkind," in Story magazine, and soon was contributing fiction to The NewYorker, Harper's Bazaar, and Mademoiselle. She won early critical and commercialsuccess with her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), published whenshe was only twenty-three. Over the next quarter-century she published four morenovels and a collection of short stories, and found Broadway success with her playThe Member of the Wedding (produced in 1950). After a series of increasinglydebilitating strokes, she died in Nyack, N.Y., in 1967, at the age of fifty. Carlos L. Dews is the editor of the two-volume Library of America Carson McCullers editionas well aIllumination and Night Glare- The Unfinished Autobiography of Carson McCullers(University of Wisconsin Press, 1999). He is chair of the Department of English Language andLiterature at John Cabot University, Rome, and the Director of JCU's Institute for CreativeWriting and Literary Translation. From the Boxed Set edition.