Carson McCullers (February 19, 1917 – September 29, 1967) was an American novelist, short-story writer, playwright, essayist, and poet.

Her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), explores the spiritual isolation of misfits and outcasts in a small town of the Southern United States.

In September 1934, at age 17, she left home on a steamship bound for New York City, planning to study piano at the Juilliard School of Music.

[5] Returning to New York, she worked in menial jobs while pursuing a writing career; she attended night classes at Columbia University and studied creative writing under Texas writer Dorothy Scarborough and with Sylvia Chatfield Bates at Washington Square College of New York University.

In 1936, she published her first work, "Wunderkind", an autobiographical piece that Bates admired, depicting a music prodigy's adolescent insecurity and losses.

[7] They began their married life in Charlotte, North Carolina, where Reeves had found work as a credit salesman.

[12] With influences such as Isak Dinesen, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and Tolstoy, she published eight books; the best known are The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941) and The Member of the Wedding (1946).

The novella The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951) depicts loneliness and the pain of unrequited love; at the time of its writing, McCullers was a resident at Yaddo, the artists' colony in Saratoga Springs, New York.

Huston, in his autobiography, An Open Book (1980), wrote of her: I first met Carson McCullers during the war when I was visiting Paulette Goddard and Burgess Meredith in upstate New York.

In his review 'Hugo: Secrets of the Inner Landscape', he stated: To me the most impressive aspect of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is the astonishing humanity that enables a white writer, for the first time in Southern fiction, to handle Negro characters with as much ease and justice as those of her own race.

This cannot be accounted for stylistically or politically; it seems to stem from an attitude toward life which enables Miss McCullers to rise above the pressures of her environment and embrace white and black humanity in one sweep of apprehension and tenderness.

Love letters written to McCullers from Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach are at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

[17] Her most documented and extended love obsession was with Annemarie Schwarzenbach, of whom she once wrote "She had a face that I knew would haunt me for the rest of my life."

[16][18] Sarah Schulman writes: There is the infamous obsession with Katherine Anne Porter and a much-implied ongoing "friendship" with Gypsy Rose Lee.

According to McCullers's brilliant biographer, Virginia Spencer Carr, Carson did brag to her male cousin that she'd had sex with Gypsy once.

She clearly wrote against the grain of heterosexual convention, wore men's clothes, was outrageously aggressive in her consistently failed search for sex and love with another woman, and formed primary friendships with other gay people.

[citation needed] In a discussion with the Irish critic and writer Terence de Vere White, McCullers said, "Writing, for me, is a search for God".

The most recent scholarly collection of commentaries on her work is Carson McCullers in the Twenty-First Century (2016), edited by Graham-Bertolini and Kayser.

To that end, the center operates a museum in the Smith–McCullers' home, presents extensive educational and cultural programs for the community, maintains an ever-growing archive of materials related to the life and work of McCullers, and offers fellowships for writers and composers who live for periods of time in the Smith-McCullers home in Columbus.

The two former McCullers houses now owned by Columbus State University together contain the world's most extensive research collection on the author.

[33] Other critics have noted that "McCullers camouflaged her love for women in her fiction, [and] gay and lesbian themes are inarguably present in her work.