McCullers, Carson (redirected from Lula Carson Smith)

McCullers, Carson, 1917–67, American novelist, b. Columbus, Ga. as Lula Carson Smith, studied at Columbia. The central theme of her novels is the spiritual isolation that underlies the human condition. Her characters are usually outcasts and misfits whose longings for love are never fulfilled. In her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), a deaf-mute is the focus of a circle of sad and tormented people. The Member of the Wedding (1946; dramatization, 1950), her best-known work, is the tender story of a lonely adolescent girl. Her other works include the novels Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941) and Clock without Hands (1961); a volume of stories, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1951; title story dramatized by Edward Albee in 1963); and a play, The Square Root of Wonderful (1958). As a result of misdiagnosed rheumatic fever in her adolescence, McCullers suffered a series of strokes during her twenties that left her partially paralyzed; during her last years she was confined to a wheelchair. A posthumous collection of her writings, The Mortgaged Heart, was published in 1972.

Bibliography

See her Complete Novels (2001); C. L. Dews, ed., Illumination and Night Glare: The Unfinished Autobiography of Carson McCullers (1967, pub. 1999); biographies by O. W. Evans (1965), V. Spencer-Carr (1975), and J. Savigneau (2001); study by M. McDowell (1980).

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McCullers, Carson

 orig. Lula Carson Smith

(born Feb. 19, 1917, Columbus, Ga., U.S.—died Sept. 29, 1967, Nyack, N.Y.) U.S. novelist and short-story writer. She studied at Columbia and New York universities and eventually settled in New York's Greenwich Village. A series of strokes she suffered as a child left her partly paralyzed. She typically set her stories in small Southern communities and depicted the inner lives of lonely people. Her novels include The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), perhaps her finest work; Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941); The Member of the Wedding (1946), which she adapted into a play (1950); and The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951), dramatized by Edward Albee in 1963. Each of these was adapted for film.

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McCullers, Carson (b. Lula Carson Smith) (1917–67) writer; born in Columbus, Ga. She studied at Columbia and New York University (1935–36). She was an accomplished pianist and intended to study at Julliard, but due to poor health, she studied writing instead. She married J. Reeves McCullers (1937), was divorced (1940), and remarried him in 1945. Her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), drew upon her Southern background and explored themes of loss and isolation also seen in her later works. Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941), was followed by the short novel The Ballad of the Sad Café (1943), and the novel, The Member of the Wedding (1946; stage adapta- tion 1950). She suffered several strokes in 1947, was operated on for breast cancer (1961), and died of a stroke in Nyack, N.Y.