orig. Lula Carson Smith
born Feb. 19, 1917, Columbus, Ga., U.S.
died Sept. 29, 1967, Nyack, N.Y.
U.S. novelist and short-story writer.
She studied at Columbia and New York universities and eventually settled in New York's Greenwich Village. A series of strokes she suffered as a child left her partly paralyzed. She typically set her stories in small Southern communities and depicted the inner lives of lonely people. Her novels include The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), perhaps her finest work; Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941); The Member of the Wedding (1946), which she adapted into a play (1950); and The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951), dramatized by Edward Albee in 1963. Each of these was adapted for film.