Spring 2001

CARSON McCULLERS: A Life

by Michael Malone

. By Josyane Savigneau; transl. by Joan E. Howard. Houghton Mifflin. 370 pp. $30 I once heard Eudora Welty quote some advice Willa Cather had given her: "Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet." It is advice southern writers have traditionally taken to heart, creating from their regional postage stamps of America our nation’s literary landscape. On that fictional map is a small, hot, dreary Georgia mill town where during the Great Depression a girl named Lula Carson Smith (k...

I once heard Eudora Welty quote some advice Willa Cather had given her: "Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet." It is advice southern writers have traditionally taken to heart, creating from their regional postage stamps of America our nation’s literary landscape. On that fictional map is a small, hot, dreary Georgia mill town where during the Great Depression a girl named Lula Carson Smith (known as Sister) grew into a tall, gangly misfit who fled from loneliness by playing Bach and reading Flaubert and making up stories. At 20, she married another would-be writer, the charming Reeves McCullers, a serviceman at Fort Benning, the first boy who ever kissed her.

Carson McCullers (1917–67) was 23 when her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), made her famous overnight. Like This Side of Paradise before it and The Catcher in the Rye for a later generation, McCullers’s novel depicted a character—awkward, androgynous, swaggering adolescent Mick—in whom young rebels, with or without causes, saw themselves. She wrote another novel, The Member of the Wedding (1946), and then adapted it for the stage. Starring Ethel Waters and Julie Harris, her first play became a huge hit on Broadway.

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