The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullersThe Lonely Hunter is widely accepted as the standard biography of Carson McCullers. Author of such landmarks of modern American fiction as Reflections in a Golden Eye and The Ballad of the Sad Café, Carson McCullers was the enfant terrible of the literary world of the 1940s and 1950s. Gifted but tormented, vulnerable but exploitative, McCullers led a life that had all the elements--and more--of a tragic novel. From McCullers's birth in Columbus, Georgia, in 1917 to her death in upstate New York in 1967, The Lonely Hunter thoroughly covers every significant event in, and aspect of, the writer's life: her rise as a young literary sensation; her emotional, artistic, and sexual eccentricities and entanglements; her debilitating illnesses; her travels in America and Europe; and the provenance of her works from their earliest drafts through their book, stage, and film versions. To research her subject, Virginia Spencer Carr visited all of the important places in McCullers's life, read virtually everything written by or about her, and interviewed hundreds of McCullers's relatives, friends, and enemies. The result is an enduring, distinguished portrait of a brilliant, but deeply troubled, writer. |
Contents
Georgia Girlhood | 1 |
Apprenticeship in New York City | 41 |
Marriage and the Heart | 74 |
New Yorks New Literary Darling Summer 1940 | 97 |
7 Middagh Street A Queer Menage | 117 |
New York City and Yaddo 1941 | 141 |
Columbus and Yaddo Fall 1941Winter 1942 | 186 |
Reconciliation and Remarriage Columbus and Nyack 194345 | 224 |
Fame and Disillusionment 195053 | 352 |
Emergence from the Chrysalis 195355 | 404 |
The Last Years Dissolution and Regeneration | 449 |
Notes | 538 |
Genealogies | 561 |
A Chronology of Carson Smith McCullers | 568 |
Bibliography | 580 |
| 585 | |
Nyack and Paris 194547 | 255 |
Gloom and Elation Nyack and Broadway 194850 | 294 |
Picture Credits | 599 |