McCULLERS, Carson

(b. 19 February 1917 in Columbus, Georgia; d. 29 September 1967 in Nyack, New York), novelist, short-story writer, and playwright who in 1961 published her last major work, Clock Without Hands, completing a small but important body of fiction known for its sensitive portrayals of social outcasts and misfits.

McCullers was born Lula Carson Smith, the oldest of three children of Lamar Smith, a jewelry store owner, and Vera Marguerite Waters. McCullers showed an early aptitude for the piano, but after moving to New York City in 1934, she studied creative writing at Columbia University and New York University. In 1937 she married James Reeves McCullers, Jr., a serviceman and would-be writer. Their relationship was tumultuous, fueled in part by their excessive alcohol use. They divorced in 1941 but remarried in 1945. In 1953 Reeves McCullers committed suicide. They had no children.

Carson McCullers published her best-known works well before 1960. She established her literary career at age twenty-three with her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), a haunting drama centering on an enigmatic deaf-mute and four loners who tell him their deepest thoughts. A year later she published Reflections in a Golden Eye, a short novel about sexual obsessions at a southern army base. It was followed by The Ballad of the Sad Café (1943), a novella about a bizarre love triangle between a mannish woman, a hunchback, and an ex-convict. The Member of the Wedding, chronicling a lonely twelve-year-old girl's desperate attempt to escape her hometown, was published in 1946. The stage version of this novel, adapted by McCullers herself, had a successful Broadway run from 1950 to 1951.

Despite her accomplishments, which included two Guggenheim Fellowships, McCullers entered the 1960s in a precarious state. She had suffered respiratory and heart ailments since childhood, and two strokes in 1947 had partially paralyzed her left side. She had not had a major publication in over a decade. When her semiautobiographical second play, The Square Root of Wonderful, failed on Broadway in 1957, she was devastated. Moreover, she was emotionally needy. During her marriage and afterward, McCullers had a series of crushes on men and women, including the writer Katherine Anne Porter. McCullers also experienced depression and in 1948 attempted suicide. She was in constant physical pain. Many friends did not expect that she would live to finish Clock Without Hands.

McCullers had conceived of the idea for Clock Without Hands in the 1940s and began writing it in 1951. She worked on it from 1952 to 1953, while she and her husband were living in France, and in 1954, during one of her several stays at Yaddo, a writers' retreat in Saratoga Springs, New York. With the encouragement of her friends, most notably her physician Mary Mercer, McCullers finally finished the manuscript in December 1960. Although some, including McCullers's longtime friend the playwright Tennessee Williams, did not deem the manuscript ready for publication, those closest to her feared that she could not work on it any longer. The novel was published in September 1961.

Whereas McCullers's earlier fiction focuses on the private agonies of people on the fringe, Clock Without Hands plays out on a more public stage. The novel is set in a small Georgia town on the eve of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision to desegregate public schools. As in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, there is a large network of loosely connected characters. Chief among them are Judge Fox Clane, a hidebound politician who tries to roll back time through ludicrous schemes; Jester Clane, his liberal but naive grandson; and Sherman Pew, an impetuous young man troubled by his mixed-race parentage. Together they embody the changing attitudes toward race relations in the postwar South as well as the continuing obstacles and tragedies in the fight for justice. Another key character is J. T. Malone, the town pharmacist, who on the opening pages of the novel discovers that he is dying of leukemia. The novel, which closes with his passing, is also a meditation on life's meaning and on death, a theme that preoccupied McCullers in her own life.

Coming fifteen years after McCullers's last major book publication, Clock Without Hands was eagerly anticipated—it remained on best-selling lists for months—and was widely reviewed. It received decidedly mixed notices. Those who found the book disappointing cited insufficient character and plot development and a weakening of McCullers's craft. Clock Without Hands is generally considered the least successful of McCullers's longer works of fiction. It is also the only one not to have been dramatized.

McCullers endured more health setbacks in the 1960s, including breast cancer, a broken hip and elbow, and several corrective surgeries for her atrophied limbs. For most of her last years she was wheelchair-bound or bedridden in her Nyack, New York, home, where she had lived for the most part since 1945. Despite her near paralysis, she traveled to England in October 1962 and Ireland in April 1967, the latter trip at the invitation of John Huston, who had just directed a film version of Reflections in a Golden Eye.

As McCullers's health further declined in the 1960s, so did the volume of her literary output. Following Clock Without Hands, she published only a handful of short stories and articles in magazines, and a collection of children's verses titled Sweet as a Pickle, Clean as a Pig (1964) was published posthumously in 1971. A musical version of The Member of the Wedding, a collaborative effort with Mary Rogers, was not realized. But if McCullers herself produced little in the 1960s, others kept her works alive in the public mind. In addition to Huston's film, McCullers saw two of her other works take on a life of their own. Edward Albee's adaptation of The Ballad of the Sad Café played on Broadway from 1963 to 1964. In 1965 Thomas Ryan completed his screenplay for The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, which was directed by Robert Ellis Miller and released in 1968. In 1966 McCullers began dictating her autobiography to her assistants and friends. Left incomplete when she died from a cerebral hemorrhage the next year, it was published in 1999 as Illumination and Night Glare. McCullers is buried in Oak Hill Cemetery in Nyack.

In a sense, McCullers's fiction is prophetic. Her novels are populated with blacks agitating for equal rights, men and women struggling to redefine unconventional love, and people unhappy with the status quo—all themes that came to the forefront in the 1960s. Some scholars have suggested that illnesses kept McCullers from fully realizing her talents, but what she did write has given an eloquent voice to the alienated, the oppressed, and those who simply do not fit in.

A major collection of McCullers's manuscripts, correspondence, and other papers is at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. Additional correspondence is held at the Robert Flower Collection at Duke University. Virginia Spencer Carr, The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers (1975), is the definitive book-length study. Josyane Savigneau, Carson McCullers: A Life (2001), which was written with the cooperation of McCullers's estate, including permission to quote from unpublished materials and an interview with Mary Mercer, presents a more sympathetic portrait. An obituary is on the front page of the New York Times (30 Sept. 1967).

Jeffrey H. Chen