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Speaking of Stories transforming
short stories from the page to the stage
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CARSON MCCULLERS Lula Carson Smith (Carson McCullers) was born in Columbus, Georgia. From the age of five she took piano lessons, and at the age of 15 she received a typewriter from her father. Two years later she moved to New York to study piano at Juilliard School of Music, but never attended the school - she managed to lose the money set aside for her tuition. McCullers worked in menial jobs and devoted herself to writing. She studied creative writing at Columbia and New York universities and published in 1936 an autobiographical piece, Wunderkind in Story magazine. It depicted a musical prodigy's failure and adolescent insecurity. In 1937 she married Reeves McCullers, a failed author. They moved to North Caroline, living there for two years. During this time she wrote The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, a novel in the Southern Gothic tradition. It was well-received when it came out, and it was interpreted as an anti-fascist book. In 1968 it was filmed with Alan Arkin in the lead role. Reflections in a Golden Eye was directed by John Huston (1967), starring Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor. McCullers's marriage turned out to be unlucky. They both had homosexual relationships and separated in 1940. She moved to New York to live with George Davis, the editor of Harper's Bazaar. McCullers became a member of the art commune February House in Brooklyn. Among their friends were W.H. Auden, Paul and Jane Bowles, and the striptease artiste Gipsy Rose Lee. After World War II McCullers lived mostly in Paris. Her close friends during these years included Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams. In 1945 McCullers remarried with Reeves, and in 1948 under depression she attempted suicide. Reeves killed himself in a Paris hotel in 1953 with an overdose of sleeping pills. McCullers's bitter-sweet play The Square Root of Wonderful (1958) was an attempt to examine these traumatic experiences. The Member of the Wedding (1946) was made into a Broadway production and had a successful run from 1950-51. Carson McCullers suffered throughout her life from several illnesses - she had contracted rheumatic fever at the age of fifteen and a series of strokes left her a virtual invalid in her early 30's. She died in New York on September 29, 1967, after a stroke and a resultant brain haemorrhage. Her last book, Illunmination and Night Glare (1999), McCullers dictated during her final months. Although her oeuvre is often described as "Southern Gothic," McCullers produced her novels after leaving the South. In the grotesque world of McCullers's fiction her eccentric characters suffer from loneliness that she interpreted with deep empathy.
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