Carson McCullers

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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.

Milestones

19 February 1917

CMC was born as Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia, the eldest of three children.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
Dews, Carlos L., and Carson McCullers. “Chronology and Notes”. Complete Novels, Library of America, Literary Classics of the United States, pp. 807-27.
807

December 1936

CMC 's earliest story to reach print, Wunderkind, appeared in Story, a magazine edited by Whit Burnett , with whom she had been studying at Columbia .
Dews, Carlos L., and Carson McCullers. “Chronology and Notes”. Complete Novels, Library of America, Literary Classics of the United States, pp. 807-27.
809
Lockwood, Patricia. “Aviators and Movie Stars”. London Review of Books, Vol.
39
, No. 20, pp. 5-7.
5

4 June 1940

CMC published her first and best-known novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.
Dews, Carlos L., and Carson McCullers. “Chronology and Notes”. Complete Novels, Library of America, Literary Classics of the United States, pp. 807-27.
809

1966

CMC began (dictating, since she was now bedridden) an autobiography which she called Illumination and Night Glare. She left it unfinished.
Lockwood, Patricia. “Aviators and Movie Stars”. London Review of Books, Vol.
39
, No. 20, pp. 5-7.
7

29 September 1967

CMC died in hospital at Nyack, New York, after forty-seven days in a coma caused by a massive brain haemorrhage. She was fifty.
Dews, Carlos L., and Carson McCullers. “Chronology and Notes”. Complete Novels, Library of America, Literary Classics of the United States, pp. 807-27.
819

6 July 1999

Illumination and Night Glare: the Unfinished Autobiography of Carson McCullers, which she dictated over the last months of her life but never finished, was finally published more than thirty years after her death.
McCullers, Carson. Carson McCullers: Stories, Plays and Other Writings. Editor Dews, Carlos L., The Library of America.
579
Dews, Carlos L., and Carson McCullers. “Chronology and Notes”. Complete Novels, Library of America, Literary Classics of the United States, pp. 807-27.
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Biography

Birth and Family

19 February 1917

CMC was born as Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia, the eldest of three children.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
Dews, Carlos L., and Carson McCullers. “Chronology and Notes”. Complete Novels, Library of America, Literary Classics of the United States, pp. 807-27.
807