Carson McCullers was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia,on
February 19, 1917. At the age of nineteen she published her first
short story,"Wunderkind," in Story magazine, and soon was
contributing fiction to The NewYorker, Harper's Bazaar, and
Mademoiselle. She won early critical and commercialsuccess with her
first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), published whenshe
was only twenty-three. Over the next quarter-century she published
four morenovels and a collection of short stories, and found
Broadway success with her playThe Member of the Wedding (produced
in 1950). After a series of increasinglydebilitating strokes, she
died in Nyack, N.Y., in 1967, at the age of fifty.
Carlos L. Dews is the editor of the two-volume Library of America
Carson McCullers editionas well aIllumination and Night Glare- The
Unfinished Autobiography of Carson McCullers(University of
Wisconsin Press, 1999). He is chair of the Department of English
Language andLiterature at John Cabot University, Rome, and the
Director of JCU's Institute for CreativeWriting and Literary
Translation.
From the Boxed Set edition.
"Of all the Southern writers, she is he most apt to endure. . . .
Her genius for prose remains one of the few satisfying
achievements of our second-rate culture." —Gore Vidal
"A genius . . . She knows her own original, fearless, and
compassionate mind. What she has, before anything else, is a
courageous imagination-one that is bold enough to consider
the terrible in human nature without loss of nerve, calm,
dignity, or love." —V. S. Pritchett
"The most impressive aspect of [her work] is the astonishing
compassion that enables a white writer, for the first time in
Southern fiction, to handle Negro characters with as much ease
and justice as those of her own race. This cannot be accounted for
stylistically or politically; it seems to stem from an
attitude toward life which enables Mrs. McCullers to
rise above the pressures of her environment and embrace white
and black humanity in one sweep of apprehension and
tenderness." —Richard Wright
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