Born on February 19, 1917, in Columbus, Georgia, Carson Smith grew up in a region that provided the setting for all of her later fiction. At seventeen she went to New York City to study at Columbia and New York universities, and in September 1937 she married Reeves McCullers. Her life after that was clouded by illness and tragedy. Repeated strokes incapacitated her for long periods, and partial paralysis confined her to a wheelchair in her later years. Her achievement as a writer, a career that was successfully launched by her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, 1940, was the outgrowth of her own character and lonely suffering.
Her fictional characters endured various physical and psychological handicaps that complicated their natural but often bizarre searches for compassion. Reflections in a Golden Eye, 1941, a shorter work set in a Southern army post that chronicled the unhappy life of a captain (a latent homosexual) and his wife (a nymphomaniac), confirmed her earlier success; it was made into a film released in 1967. (In 1968 The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was made into a motion picture.) The Member of the Wedding, 1946, proved her most popular work. The sensitive portrayal of Frankie, a lonely adolescent whose attachment to her brother precipitates a crisis at his wedding, was equally successful in her dramatic version, which ran on Broadway from January 1950 to March 1951 (featuring Ethel Waters) and for which she won a New York Drama Critics╒ Circle award; it too was made into a movie. Her other works included The Ballad of the Sad CafÄ, 1951, a collection from which the title novelette was dramatized by Edward Albee in 1963; The Square Root of Wonderful, 1958, another play; and Clock Without Hands, a novel, 1961. Carson McCullers died in Nyack, New York, on September 29, 1967.
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