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 New Yorker,
Harper's Bazaar, and Mademoiselle. She won early critical and
commercial success with her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely
Hunter (1940), published when she was only twenty-three. Over
the next quarter-century she published four more novels and a
collection of short stories, and found Broadway success with her
play The Member of the Wedding (produced in 1950). After a
series of increasingly debilitating 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 edition as well a Illumination
and Night Glare: The Unfinished Autobiography of Carson
McCullers (University of Wisconsin Press, 1999). He is chair
of the Department of English Language and Literature at John
Cabot University, Rome, and the Director of JCU's Institute for
Creative Writing and Literary Translation.
"Of all the Southern writers, she is he most apt to endure. . . .
Her genius for prose remains one of the few satisfying
achievements of our second-rate culture." —Gore Vidal
"A genius . . . She knows her own original, fearless, and
compassionate mind. What she has, before anything else, is a
courageous imagination-one that is bold enough to consider
the terrible in human nature without loss of nerve, calm,
dignity, or love." —V. S. Pritchett
"The most impressive aspect of [her work] is the astonishing
compassion that enables a white writer, for the first time in
Southern fiction, to handle Negro characters with as much ease
and justice as those of her own race. This cannot be accounted for
stylistically or politically; it seems to stem from an
attitude toward life which enables Mrs. McCullers to
rise above the pressures of her environment and embrace white
and black humanity in one sweep of apprehension and
tenderness." —Richard Wright
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