Carson McCullers

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Standard Name: McCullers, Carson
Birth Name: Lula Carson Smith
CMC 's four novels and one novella, published between 1940 and 1961, compose a startling picture of the American South, from which she came: a society in which people's behaviour is in part wholly predictable, constrained by buried history and inherited codes of conduct, and in part opaque, springing from irrational passion, prejudice, and fixation. Though her output was severely limited by ill-health, it also included short stories, poems, essays, drama, and an unfinished autobiography.
Black and white photograph of Carson McCullers, shown from the shoulders up, against a backdrop of flower-patterned drapery. She has jaw-length hair with short bangs, and she is wearing a baggy collared shirt with lines of decorative stitching up the front, boxy shoulders, and wide frayed sleeves.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Friends, Associates Sybille Bedford
In Paris after the Second World War she met a group of American writers there: Eudora Welty , whom she judges the best writer among them, Truman Capote , Carson McCullers ,
Bedford, Sybille. Quicksands. Counterpoint, 2005.
64
and Jane Bowles
Friends, Associates Isak Dinesen
Carson McCullers , a warm admirer who had sat beside ID at the American Academy dinner a week before, hosted a lunch party for Dinesen to meet Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe .
Borne Back Daily. 2001, http://borneback.com/ .
5 February 2008
Friends, Associates Edith Sitwell
During her second American trip, those whom ES met included some of the writers previously encountered, and also Carson McCullers , Ethel Barrymore , Mary Pickford , Dorothy Parker , and Harpo Marx .
Glendinning, Victoria. Edith Sitwell. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1981.
291-3
Intertextuality and Influence Olive Senior
OS took up writing seriously after taking a Creative Writing course while doing her degree in Print Journalism at the Carleton University School of Journalism in Ottawa, Canada. During the 1960s and 1970s she...
Intertextuality and Influence Edna O'Brien
Among American writers, female and male, O'Brien particularly admires William Faulkner , Carson McCullers , Flannery O'Connor , and Eudora Welty .
Guppy, Shusha et al. “Edna OBrien”. Women Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, edited by George Plimpton and George Plimpton, Viking, 1989, pp. 337-59.
347
Literary responses Isak Dinesen
On its first appearance, ID 's acquaintance Nellie Huxley pronounced Out of Africa a bad book, tiresome and exaggerated in its character-drawing,and terribly self-conscious throughout . . . I, I, I all the time.
qtd. in
Nicholls, C. S. Elspeth Huxley. HarperCollins, 2002.
286
Occupation Elizabeth Jane Howard
In February 1962 EJH was appointed director of the Cheltenham Festival. She was full of original ideas, many of which were grudgingly rejected as impracticable. However, she achieved the coup of bringing the seriously ill...
Textual Features Alice Munro
She delights in the surfaces and textures of her material and in the power to make the familiar or the ordinary into something strange through control of the deceptively linear narrative grammar of her stories...
Textual Production Ali Smith
With her background in academia and her work reviewing fiction for The Scotsman and The Guardian, AS has produced an impressive amount of literary criticism. She has written critical introductions for reissues of work...
Textual Production Susan Hill
The anthology of British women writers she published in 1990 with Michael Joseph as The Parchment Moon: An Anthology of Modern Women's Short Stories was reprinted the following year as The Penguin Book of Modern...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Flannery O'Connor
She had strong opinions to express: she poured scorn on some other Southern writers (calling Carson McCullers ' Clock Without Handsthe worst book I have ever read, but she respected the work of Eudora Welty .
Gooch, Brad. Flannery. Little, Brown and Co., 2009.
346

Timeline

4 June 1940: The twenty-three-year-old Carson McCullers...

Writing climate item

4 June 1940

The twenty-three-year-old Carson McCullers won a chorus of praise with her first novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, centred on a young white girl growing up in the racist American south.
Borne Back Daily. 2001, http://borneback.com/ .
4 June 2008

Texts

McCullers, Carson. Carson McCullers: Stories, Plays and Other Writings. Editor Dews, Carlos L., The Library of America, 2017.
Dews, Carlos L., and Carson McCullers. “Chronology and Notes”. Complete Novels, Library of America, Literary Classics of the United States, 2001, pp. 807-27.
McCullers, Carson. Clock without Hands. Houghton Mifflin Co., 1961.
McCullers, Carson. Complete Novels. Library of America, Literary Classics of the United States, 2001.
McCullers, Carson. Illumination and Night Glare. Editor Dews, Carlos L., University of Wisconsin Press, 1999.
McCullers, Carson. Reflections in a Golden Eye. Houghton Mifflin Co., 1941.
McCullers, Carson. “The Ballad of the Sad Café”. Harper’s Bazaar, Vol.
77
, No. 2780.
McCullers, Carson. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Houghton Mifflin Co.
McCullers, Carson. The Member of the Wedding. Houghton Mifflin Co., 1946.
McCullers, Carson. The Square Root of Wonderful. Houghton Mifflin Co., 1958.