Writing about outcasts, dreamers and misfits in the Deep South, Carson McCullers was acclaimed for her sympathetic depictions of loneliness, the need for understanding and the search for love. These four masterly stories of eccentrics, failed prodigies, injustice and hope, written when she was in her twenties, explore the human condition with humour and pathos.
Author Biography
Carson McCullers was born at Columbus, Georgia, in 1917. She was always a delicate person and as a young adult she began to suffer from strokes, and by the age of thirty-one she was paralysed down her left side. For a while she could only use one finger to type, and for years before her death could not sit at a desk to work. In 1938 she married James Reeves McCullers, a corporal in the US army. The marriage was not a success and they divorced. They did, however, keep in touch and subsequently remarried, separating finally in 1953; he later committed suicide. She was established as a writer by the time she reached her twenties but it was not until she published The Heart is a Lonely Hunter at the age of twenty-three, that she won widespread recognition. Her other works include Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941), The Member of the Wedding (1946) The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1951), The Square Root of Wonderful (1958), a play, Clock Without Hands (1961), Sweet as a Pickle, Clean as a Pig (1964) and The Mortgaged Heart (published posthumously in 1972). She lived in Nyack, New York, until her death in 1967.
