CARSON MCCULLERS

The triumphs and tragedies of an American writer.

Drawing on abundant archival material, much not available to earlier biographers, Dearborn offers a thorough, passionate recounting of the life of Carson McCullers (1917-1967), a writer with an “unerring instinct for the outsider’s life.” As a young child, Carson (born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia) “was marked out as special.” Her parents decided she would become a concert pianist, a goal Carson energetically pursued, though she expressed interest in being a composer or writer. In 1934, she went to New York, apparently intending to enroll at Juilliard, but she wound up taking writing classes at Columbia instead. Soon after, on a visit home, she met the handsome James Reeves McCullers, also an aspiring writer, and, like Carson, a heavy drinker. They clicked immediately, although, Dearborn notes, “in their relationship, she was emphatically the beloved.” Carson, tall and gangly, preferred to dress in men’s clothes, which she said she found more comfortable. She and Reeves married in 1937, but Carson’s most passionate attractions were to women. Her first awakening to love was for her piano teacher; she later became obsessed with the Swiss writer Annemarie Schwarzenbach, harbored “erotic feelings” for producer Cheryl Crawford, and fell in love with her therapist, a married woman. Bisexual and androgynous, Carson made gender fluidity “a thread through her major works.” Dearborn chronicles Carson’s rise to fame, including the 1940 publication of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, her friendships with the likes of Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote, and the severe health issues and alcoholism that undermined her. Strep throat in childhood led to rheumatic fever and, by the time she was 30, two major, disabling strokes. Alive to “the dangers and ecstasies of otherness,” Carson, Dearborn writes, was defined by queerness, as an artist and a woman.

A well-researched, sensitive literary biography.