![]() ![]() ![]() In her debut, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), four Georgia townspeople cling to a polite deaf-mute jewelry repairman named John Singer, about whom they know almost nothing. The passionate oddballs in her fiction fasten almost randomly on others. Her own great loves-always women-tended not to return her devotion: “I live with the people I create and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen,” she added. A connoisseur of yearning, attuned to its quirks and variations, she realized that love itself-the subjective experience of love-is so transporting that, for some, the longed-for mutual connection can be almost beside the point. ![]() “Certainly I have always felt alone,” she wrote in a preface to one of her plays. Loneliness, isolation, and obsessive love: McCullers never buried her central themes. “She was a tragic figure in a way,” recalled Edward Albee, “but she was very, very good at being a tragic figure. It took McCullers over ten years to complete her final novel, Clock Without Hands (1961). Two disabling strokes when she was thirty almost ended her career. Her precocious talent survived her turbulent marriage, her fragile health, and her drinking (she carried a thermos of spiked tea to her desk each morning), but her pace slowed. Carson McCullers, Columbus, Georgia, 1941Ĭarson McCullers, who once loomed large in the mid-twentieth-century literature of the South, now seems the smallest bird on the branch that holds William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Truman Capote, Richard Wright, and McCullers’s close friend Tennessee Williams. ![]()
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