Carson McCullers: A Life -- Mary V. Dearborn, Hardcover

The first major biography in more than twenty years of one of America's greatest writers, based on newly available letters and journals

V. S. Pritchett called her "a genius." Gore Vidal described her as a "beloved novelist of singular brilliance . . . Of all the Southern writers, she is the most apt to endure . . ." And Tennessee Williams said, "The only real writer the South ever turned out, was Carson."

She was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia. Her dream was to become a concert pianist, though she'd been writing since she was sixteen and the influence of music was evident throughout her work. As a child, she said she'd been "born a man." At twenty, she married Reeves McCullers, a fellow southerner, ex-soldier, and aspiring writer ("He was the best-looking man I had ever seen"). They had a fraught, tumultuous marriage lasting twelve years and ending with his suicide in 1953. Reeves was devoted to her and to her writing, and he envied her talent; she yearned for attention, mostly from women who admired her but rebuffed her sexually. Her first novel--The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter--was published in 1940, when she was twenty-three, and overnight, Carson McCullers became the most widely talked about writer of the time.

While McCullers's literary stature continues to endure, her private life has remained enigmatic and largely unexamined. Now, with unprecedented access to the cache of materials that has surfaced in the past decade, Mary Dearborn gives us the first full picture of this brilliant, complex artist who was decades ahead of her time, a writer who understood--and captured--the heart and longing of the outcast.

Author: Mary V. Dearborn
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Published: 02/27/2024
Pages: 496
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.80lbs
Size: 9.42h x 6.59w x 1.57d
ISBN: 9780525521013

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal Prepub Alert 09/01/2023 pg. 23
Publishers Weekly 12/04/2023
Kirkus Reviews 12/15/2023
Booklist 01/01/2024 pg. 18

About the Author
MARY V. DEARBORN holds a doctorate in English and comparative literature from Columbia University, where she was a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities. She is the author of seven books--among them, Mistress of Modernism: The Life of Peggy Guggenheim and Ernest Hemingway. Dearborn has been a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She lives in Buckland, Massachusetts.