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Carson McCullers

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Carson McCullers (February 19, 1917 – September 29, 1967) was an American novelist, short-story writer, playwright, essayist, and poet. Her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), explores the spiritual isolation of misfits and outcasts in a small town in the Southern United States. Her other novels have similar themes; most are set in the deep South.

McCullers's work is often described as Southern Gothic and indicative of her Southern roots. Critics also describe her writing and eccentric characters as universal in scope. Her stories have been adapted to stage and film. A stage adaptation of her novel The Member of the Wedding (1946), which captures a young girl's feelings at her brother's wedding, made a successful Broadway run in 1950–51.

McCullers was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia, in 1917 to Lamar Smith, a jeweler, and Marguerite Waters. She was named after her maternal grandmother, Lula Carson Waters. She had a younger brother, Lamar, Jr., and a younger sister, Marguerite. Her mother's grandfather was a planter and Confederate soldier. Her father was a watchmaker and jeweler of French Huguenot descent. From age ten, she took piano lessons; when she was fifteen, her father gave her a typewriter to encourage her story-writing.

Smith graduated from Columbus High School. In September 1934, at age 17, she left home on a steamship bound for New York City, planning to study piano at the Juilliard School of Music. After losing the money she was going to use to study at Juilliard on the subway, she decided instead to work, take night classes, and write. She worked several odd jobs as a waitress and dog walker.

After falling ill with rheumatic fever, she returned to Columbus to recuperate and changed her mind about studying music. Returning to New York, she worked in menial jobs while pursuing a writing career; she attended night classes at Columbia University and studied creative writing under Texas writer Dorothy Scarborough and with Sylvia Chatfield Bates at Washington Square College of New York University. 

In 1936, she published her first work. "Wunderkind," an autobiographical piece that Bates admired, depicts a music prodigy's adolescent insecurity and losses. It first appeared in Story magazine and is collected in The Ballad of the Sad Cafe. From 1935 to 1937, as her studies and health dictated, she divided her time between Columbus and New York. In September 1937, aged 20, she married an ex-soldier and aspiring writer, Reeves McCullers. 

A New Yorker profile described her husband as "…a dreamer attracted to big, capable women." They began their married life in Charlotte, North Carolina, where Reeves had found work. The couple made a pact to take alternating turns as a writer and then breadwinner, starting with Reeves's taking a salaried position while McCullers wrote. Her eventual success as a writer precluded his literary ambitions.

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The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

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