Knopf Doubleday, Sachbücher, Carson McCullers (Englisch, Mary V. Dearborn, 2024)

The first major biography in more than twenty years of one of America&rsquo s greatest writers, based on newly available letters and journals V. S. Pritchett called her &ldquo a genius.&rdquo Gore Vidal described her as a &ldquo beloved novelist of singular brilliance . . . Of all the Southern writers, she is the most apt to endure . . .&rdquo And Tennessee Williams said, &ldquo The only real writer the South ever turned out, was Carson.&rdquo She was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia. Her dream was to become a concert pianist, though she&rsquo d been writing since she was sixteen and the influence of music was evident throughout her work. As a child, she said she&rsquo d been &ldquo born a man.&rdquo At twenty, she married Reeves McCullers, a fellow southerner, ex-soldier, and aspiring writer (&ldquo He was the best-looking man I had ever seen&rdquo ). 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&mdash The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter&mdash 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&rsquo 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&mdash and captured&mdash the heart and longing of the outcast.