Carson McCullers (1917–67,) fully Lula Carson McCullers, née Smith, was an American writer of novels and stories that portray the desolation and the plight of lonely southern lives.
Born in Columbus, Georgia, McCullers attended classes at Columbia and New York University. After marrying in 1937, she moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, then to New York’s Greenwich Village in 1941. Her début work, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940,) about a deaf and mute individual who tries unsuccessfully to interact with people around him, ennobled her as a novelist of note.
McCullers wrote the best and the greater part of her work in six years during World War II. Along with William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, and Truman Capote, she is ascribed with creating a type of fiction labeled by critics as Southern Gothic. Combining “anguish and farce,” she peopled her work with grotesque characters who are expressionistic extensions of typical, universal human problems.
McCullers’s books include Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941,) The Member of the Wedding (1946,) The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1951,) and Clock Without Hands (1961.)
McCullers’s biographies include Oliver Evans’s Carson McCullers: Her Life and Work (1965,) Lawrence Graver, Carson McCullers (1969,) and Josyane Savigneau’s Carson McCullers: A Life (2001.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Carson McCullers
It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the roller-coaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the home town or country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.
—Carson McCullers
All men are lonely. But sometimes it seems to me that we Americans are the loneliest of all. Our hunger for foreign places and new ways has been with us almost like a national disease. Our literature is stamped with a quality of longing and unrest, and our writers have been great wanderers.
—Carson McCullers
Topics: Loneliness
There’s nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book.
—Carson McCullers
Topics: Existence
The mind is like a richly woven tapestry in which the colors are distilled from the experiences of the senses, and the design drawn from the convolutions of the intellect.
—Carson McCullers
Topics: Thinking
While time, the endless idiot, runs screaming round the world.
—Carson McCullers
Topics: Time, Time Management
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