MCCULLERS, CARSON

born Feb. 19, 1917, Columbus, Ga., U.S. died Sept. 29, 1967, Nyack, N.Y. ne Lula Carson Smith American writer of novels and stories that depict the inner lives of lonely people. At age 17 Lula Carson Smith went to New York City to study at Columbia and New York universities, and in 1937 she married Reeves McCullers, a writer; the couple divorced in 1940 but remarried in 1945. Her life after that was clouded by illness and tragedy. Repeated strokes incapacitated her for long periods, and partial paralysis confined McCullers 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. McCullers's fictional characters endured various physical and psychological handicaps that complicated their natural but often bizarre searches for compassion. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter concerns four inhabitants of a small town in Georgiaan adolescent girl with a passion to study music, an unsuccessful socialist agitator, a black physician struggling to maintain his personal dignity, and a widower who owns a caf. Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941), a shorter work set in a Southern army post that chronicles the unhappy life of a captain (a latent homosexual) and his wife (a nymphomaniac), confirmed McCullers's earlier success; it was made into a film released in 1967. (In 1968 The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was also made into a motion picture.) The Member of the Wedding (1946) proved her most popular work. A sensitive portrayal of a lonely adolescent whose attachment to her brother precipitates a crisis at his wedding, the story was equally successful as a play. The Broadway version ran for more than a year and was made into a movie (1952). McCullers's other works include The Ballad of the Sad Caf (1951), the drama The Square Root of Wonderful (1958), and the novel Clock Without Hands (1961)