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Carson McCullers was born in 1917 in Columbus, Georgia.  When she was fifteen, her father gave her a typewriter, perhaps the gift was for her birthday, or a gift of love while she suffered from Rheumatic fever. Whatever led him to give her a typewriter, changed the course of her life.

Though she suffered from illnesses, her independence pushed her forward into a world of possibilities. She left home at seventeen to study music in New York’s Juilliard School of Music, but she never attended.  Instead, she took odd jobs and worked on her writing.  She studied writing at Columbia and NYU.  In 1936, she published an autobiographical piece called Wunderkind, in Story magazine.

In 1937 she married Reeves McCullers. They shared a passion for writing, but he did not have her talent.  They moved to North Carolina, and it was there that she wrote The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, a novel in the Southern Gothic tradition. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter received high praise upon its publication.  This novel and Reflections of a Golden Eye were adapted to film.  Her eccentric characters resonated with readers.  Their loneliness was intense and drew deep empathy. In a discussion with the Irish critic and writer Terence De Vere White McCullers confessed: “Writing, for me, is a search for God.”

McCullers’s marriage took an unusual turn when they both recognized their own homosexual tendencies. They separated in 1940. She moved to New York to live with George Davis, the editor of Harper’s Bazaar.  While there, she became friends with W.H. Auden.  After World War II McCullers moved to Paris and became close friends with Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote.

In 1945, McCullers remarried Reeves McCullers.  In 1948, Carson fell into a deep state of depression.  Mostly likely due to her illness.  She tried to commit suicide.  Reeves, too weak himself to care for her, killed himself in 1953.  After his death, McCullers’s used her writing to sort through her depression and the loss of her husband.  In 1958 she wrote a play titled, The Square Root Of Wonderful, which reflects this period of her life.

By her early thirties, a series of small strokes left her practically an invalid. Slowly, stubbornly, she was forced to rely on others for care.  She was working on an autobiography, Illuminations and Night Glare when she died in New York on September 29, 1967. Her death was the result of another stroke and a brain hemorrhage. Illuminations and Night Glarewas published in 1999. I

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