Carson McCullers was born at Columbus, Georgia, in 1917. Always a delicate person, as a young adult she began experiencing strokes, and at the age of thirty-one her entire left side was paralysed. For a while she could only use one finger to type, and for years before her death, as her sister informs us, she 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 continued to 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, when she was twenty-three, that she won widespread recognition. Her other works include Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941), The Member of the Wedding (1946; this book won the New York Critics Award in 1950 and was staged as a play at the Royal Court Theatre, London), The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951), The Square Root of Wonderful (1958), a play, Clock Without Hands (1961), Sweet as a Pickle and Clean as a Pig (1964) and The Mortgaged Heart (published posthumously in 1972).
Many of her books have been published by Penguin. She was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1942-3 and again in 1946, and received an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1945; she was also a Fellow of the Academy. She lived in Nyack, New York, until her death in 1967. Described by V. S. Pritchett as an incomparable storyteller, it was some time before she achieved recognition outside the United States.
Graham Greene wrote of her: Miss McCullers and perhaps Mr Faulkner are the only writers since the death of D. H. Lawrence with an original poetic sensibility. I prefer Miss McCullers to Mr Faulkner because she writes more clearly; I prefer her to D. H. Lawrence because she has no message.
The marriage was not a success and they divorced. They continued to 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, when she was twenty-three, that she won widespread recognition. Her other works include Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941), The Member of the Wedding (1946; this book won the New York Critics Award in 1950 and was staged as a play at the Royal Court Theatre, London), The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951), The Square Root of Wonderful (1958), a play, Clock Without Hands (1961), Sweet as a Pickle and Clean as a Pig (1964) and The Mortgaged Heart (published posthumously in 1972).
Many of her books have been published by Penguin. She was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1942-3 and again in 1946, and received an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1945; she was also a Fellow of the Academy. She lived in Nyack, New York, until her death in 1967. Described by V. S. Pritchett as an incomparable storyteller, it was some time before she achieved recognition outside the United States.
Graham Greene wrote of her: Miss McCullers and perhaps Mr Faulkner are the only writers since the death of D. H. Lawrence with an original poetic sensibility. I prefer Miss McCullers to Mr Faulkner because she writes more clearly; I prefer her to D. H. Lawrence because she has no message.
