CARSON McCULLERS (1917-1967).

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  • Author(s): Richards, Gary
  • Source:
    Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Short Story. 2000, p369-373. 5p.
  • Additional Information
    • Subject Terms:
    • Abstract:
      The article focuses on a play writer Carson McCullers who was born Lula Carson Smith to Lamar and Marguerite (Waters) Smith on February 19, 1917, in Columbus, Georgia. The precocious child began writing plays at an early age but held music to be her calling. There, before resettling permanently in New York in 1940, McCullers wrote most of her acclaimed first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), a tale of two male deaf mutes and the devotion that one of them, ironically named Singer, elicits from four unlikely characters. McCullers's second novel, Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941), received scant praise, as critics damned the story of murder, voyeurism, and homosexuality as too bizarre for even the southern gothic school.