Carson McCullers

I'm on to the next. Carson McCullers wrote her first novel, The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, at the age of 22. By that age she had also had rheumatic fever and several crippling strokes. She had been sent to New York to study the piano at Julliard. After losing (I wonder how this happened?) the money for her tuition, she decided to become a writer.

By the age of fifty, she was in a wheelchair, then a coma after a final stroke. Then she died.


She rolled with people like Capote, Marilyn Monroe, John Huston, Tennessee Williams, WH Auden, Benjamin Britten. Two of her novels were made into movies. She married, divorced, and was married again to a bisexual man named Reeves McCullers, who eventually tried get her to commit suicide with him in Paris. She didn't. He did. He overdosed on sleeping pills. She wrote a play about it called, The Square Root of Wonderful.

Having read about her life, I think she must have been very intense, and agonized, and frail. She wrote the books she wrote. After a stroke at the age of 30, her entire left side was paralyzed.

Here is her Wikipedia entry, and here is a web site called the Carson McCullers Project.

I'm planning to read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and also Ballad of the Sad Cafe (and whatever other stories are in that volume).