McCULLERS, Carson

McCULLERS, Carson (b. 19 February 1917; d. 29 September 1967), writer.

Lula Carson Smith was born in Columbus, Georgia, the eldest of three children of Lamar Smith, a jewelry-store owner, and Vera Marguerite Waters. After graduating from high school in 1935, she studied creative writing at Columbia University and New York University. In the fall of 1936 McCullers began work on her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. The story of a deaf mute to whom the lonely and isolated people of a southern town turn for silent solace, the novel (published by Houghton Mifflin in June 1940) considered the themes of loneliness and isolation that recur in much of McCullers's work. It was an immediate and much-praised success.

Reflections in a Golden Eye, McCullers's second novel, was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1941. Readers who expected a book like the author's first novel were shocked by the story of voyeurism, obsession, repressed homosexuality, and infidelity set on a peacetime army base.

McCullers third major work, The Ballad of the Sad Café, a story of jealousy and obsession in a triangular love relationship involving an Amazon-like woman, a hunch-backed dwarf and an ex-convict, set in a small southern mill town, appeared in the August 1943 Harper's Bazaar. The work was later published in "The Ballad of the Sad Café": The Novels and Stories of Carson McCullers (1951).

March 1946 saw the publication of McCullers's fourth major work, The Member of the Wedding, the story of a lonely adolescent girl, Frankie Addams, who wants to find her "we of me" by joining with her older brother and his bride. McCullers's theatrical adaptation of the novel opened on Broadway in 1950 to near unanimous acclaim and enjoyed a run of 501 performances.

The final fifteen years of McCullers's life saw a decline in the writer's health and in her creative abilities. Bedridden by paralysis from a series of strokes, McCullers was devastated by the failed production of her second play The Square Root of Wonderful, which closed after only forty-five performances on Broadway in 1957, and the mixed reception of her final novel Clock Without Hands (1961). Her final book-length publication was a book of children's verse, Sweet as Pickle and Clean as a Pig (1964). The Mortgaged Heart, a collection of short stories, essays, and poetry, edited by McCullers's sister Margarita Smith, was published in 1971. At the time of her death she was at work on an autobiography, Illumination and Night Glare, which was posthumously published in 2000.

McCullers lived a complex and difficult personal and professional life. In September 1937, Carson married James Reeves McCullers, Jr., a native of Wetumpka, Alabama (born 11 August 1913), whom she met when he was in the army stationed at Fort Benning, near her hometown. The marriage was simultaneously the most supportive and destructive relationship in her life, and was from its beginning plagued by the partners' shared difficulty with alcoholism, their sexual ambivalence, and the tension caused by Reeves's envy of McCullers's writing abilities. The couple divorced in 1941, but reconciled and remarried in 1945. Reeves committed suicide in a Paris hotel room in November 1953.

During a separation from her husband in 1940, McCullers shared a house in Brooklyn Heights with

George Davis (an editor at Harper's Bazaar) and the British poet W. H. Auden. This house, located at 7 Middagh Street, became the center of a bohemian, sexually liberated, literary and artistic group including Gypsy Rose Lee, Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears, Richard Wright, and Oliver Smith. Following her father's sudden death in August 1944, McCullers, along with her mother and sister, moved to Nyack, New York. She spent most of the rest of her life in this house on the Hudson River.

McCullers's life was blighted by a series of cerebral strokes caused by a misdiagnosed and untreated childhood case of rheumatic fever. On 15 August 1967, McCullers suffered a final stroke. Comatose for forty-seven days, she died on 29 September 1967 in the Nyack Hospital and was buried in Nyack's Oak Hill Cemetery.

As part of a general renaissance of interest in her life and work, much of the consideration of McCullers since the 1980s has focused on her sexuality, the representation of LGBT characters in her work, and the consideration of McCullers's work vis-à-vis queer theory and LGBT aesthetics. Although she did not self-identify as a lesbian or as bisexual, McCullers was emotionally and sexually involved with both men and women during her life. Her personal philosophy regarding sexuality that was reflected in her work—that the gender of the person whom one loves is irrelevant to that love—complicates and transcends traditional, restrictive understandings of sexual and gender identity.

Bibliography

Adams, Rachel. "'A Mixture of Delicious and Freak': The Queer Fiction of Carson McCullers." American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography 71 (1999): 551–583.

Carr, Virginia Spencer. The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1975.

——. Understanding Carson McCullers. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990.

Evans, Oliver. The Ballad of Carson McCullers: A Biography. New York: Coward-McCann, 1966.

James, Judith Giblin. Wunderkind: The Reputation of Carson McCullers, 1940–1990. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1995.

Kenschaft, Lori J. "Homoerotics and Human Connections: Reading Carson McCullers 'As a Lesbian.'" In Critical Essays on Carson McCullers. Edited by Beverly Lyon Clark and Melvin J. Friedman. New York: G. K. Hall, 1996.

Kiernan, Robert F. Katherine Anne Porter and Carson McCullers: A Reference Guide. New York: G. K. Hall, 1976.

McDowell, Margaret B. Carson McCullers. Boston: Twayne, 1980.

McKinnie, Betty E., and Carlos L. Dews. "The Delayed Entrance of Lily Mae Jenkins: Queer Identity, Gender Ambiguity, and Southern Ambivalence in Carson McCullers's The Member of the Wedding." In Southern Women Playwrights: New Essays in Literary History and Criticism. Edited by Robert L. McDonald and Linda Rohrer Paige. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002.

Mukherjee, Srimati. "The Impoverishment of the Female Hero in The Ballad of the Sad Café." Proceedings of the Philological Association of Louisiana (1992): 105–109.

Portada, Arleen. "Sex-Role Rebellion and the Failure of Marriage in the Fiction of Carson McCullers." Pembroke Magazine 20 (1988): 63–71.

Savigneau, Josyane. Carson McCullers: A Life. Translated by Joan E. Howard. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001.

Shapiro, Adrian M., Jackson R. Byer, and Kathleen Field. Carson McCullers: A Descriptive Listing and Annotated Bibliography of Criticism. New York: Garland, 1980.

Sosnoski, Karen. "Society's Freaks: The Effects of Sexual Stereotyping in Carson McCullers' Fiction." Pembroke Magazine 20 (1988): 82–88.

Westling, Louise. "Tomboys and Revolting Femininity." In Critical Essays on Carson McCullers. Edited by Beverly Lyon Clark and Melvin J. Friedman. New York: G. K. Hall, 1996.

Whatling, Clare. "Reading Miss Amelia: Critical Strategies in the Construction of Sex, Gender, Sexuality, the Gothic and the Grotesque." In Modernist Sexualities. Edited by Hugh Stevens and Caroline Howlett. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2000.

Whitt, Jan. "'The We of Me': Carson McCullers as Lesbian Novelist." Journal of Homosexuality 37, no. 1 (1999): 127–140.

Carlos L. Dews

see alsoauden, w.h.; literature.