When The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was published in 1940, Carson McCullers was instantly recognized as one of the most promising writers of her generation. The novels that followed established her as a master of Southern Gothic. "McCullers' gift," writes Joyce Carol Oates, "was to evoke, through an accumulation of images and musically repeated phrases, the singularity of experience, not to pass judgment on it." McCullers effortlessly conveyed the raw anguish of her characters and the weird beauty of their perceptions. Set in small Georgia towns that are at once precisely observed and mythically resonant, McCullers' novels explore the strange, sometimes grotesque inner lives of characters who are often marginal and misunderstood. Above all, McCullers possessed an unmatched ability to capture the bewilderment and fragile wonder of adolescence. In The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, an enigmatic deaf-mute draws out the haunted confessions of an itinerant worker, a young girl, a black doctor, and the widowed owner of a small-town café. Two shorter works, Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941) and The Ballad of the Sad Café (1943), use melodramatic scenarios and freakish characters to explore the disfiguring violence of desire. The Member of the Wedding (1946), on which the play and film were based, tells of a young girl's fascination with her brother's wedding and is perhaps McCullers' most moving and accomplished novel. In Clock Without Hands (1960), the story of a terminally ill druggist, McCullers produces some of her most forceful and indignant social criticism. Edited by Carlos Dews.
Author
Fiction of American writer Carson Smith McCullers explores the spiritual isolation of misfits and outcasts of the South; her novels include The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940) and The Member of the Wedding (1946). She from 1935 to 1937 divided her time, as her studies and health dictated, between Columbus and New York and in September 1937 married Reeves McCullers, an ex-soldier and aspiring writer. Reeves found some work at Charlotte, North Carolina, where they began their married life. In Fayetteville, North Carolina, she at 23 years of age wrote The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter in the southern gothic tradition. Editor of McCullers suggested the title, taken from "The Lonely Hunter," poem of Fiona MacLeod. Carson McCullers and many other persons, however, claim that she wrote in the style of southern realism, a genre that Russian realism inspired. People interpreted the novel as an anti-fascist book. Altogether, she published eight books. People best know Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941). The novella The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1951) also depicts loneliness and the pain of unrequited love. Yaddo in Saratoga, New York, graduated her, an alumna. People filmed The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter in 1968 with Alan Arkin in the lead role. John Huston directed Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), starring Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor. People shot some of the film in city of New York and on Long Island, where the Army permitted Huston to use an abandoned installation. People filmed many of the interiors and some of the exteriors in Italy. "I first met Carson McCullers during the war when I was visiting Paulette Goddard and Burgess Meredith in upstate New York," said Huston in An Open Book (1980). "Carson lived nearby, and one day when Buzz and I were out for a walk she hailed us from her doorway. She was then in her early twenties, and had already suffered the first of a series of strokes. I remember her as a fragile thing with great shining eyes, and a tremor in her hand as she placed it in mine. It wasn't palsy, rather a quiver of animal timidity. But there was nothing timid or frail about the manner in which Carson McCullers faced life. And as her afflictions multiplied, she only grew stronger." After lifelong health problems, including severe alcoholism, McCullers died of brain hemorrhage.
