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It was these characteristics of her writing that won over critics and readers during her lifetime, and beyond. All of her work-whether they’re poems, essays, stories, or novels-display a deep empathy for the outsider, an understanding of human loneliness, and a fearlessness towards exploring “difficult” subjects. Whatever you think of McCullers as an individual, it’s inarguable that she was an unrivaled literary talent. In 1967, at the age of 50, she passed away. As McCullers gained a reputation as a master of Southern Gothic literature-and befriended Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote-her private life and health continued to deteriorate. Just after her breakout debut, she suffered from a series of minor strokes, turned to alcohol, and entered a tempestuous, on-again-off-again marriage with a fellow writer. Success was swift and major: A 19-year-old McCullers was first published in a 1936 issue of Story magazine, and she wrote her magnum opus, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, four years later.īut not everything was rosy in McCullers' life. Her pianist dreams were abandoned when, after a bout of illness, she discovered a penchant for the written word. McCullers's father was a jeweler and a watch repairman, and her mother worked for the jeweler who had employed her father before he opened his own store. As a young woman of the 1930s, she left the South to pursue a career in music-a passion she shared with one of her most famous heroines-and headed to Juilliard in New York City. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940) was her first novelpublished when she was only twenty-three years oldand her most autobiographical. Carson McCullers, née Lula Carson Smith, was born in Georgia in 1917.
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