McCullers wrote of outcasts and misfits

Carson McCullers

It is the birthday of writer Carson McCullers (1917), whose best known novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), was written when she was 23 years old. It is the story of a lonely deaf man in a southern mill town in the 1930s and the people he encounters. It was produced as a movie in 1968  and a stage play in 2005. Her works examine the loneliness of outcasts and misfits. She also wrote Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941), The Member of the Wedding (1946) and a short story collection, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1951). A play, The Square Root of Wonderful (1958), examines her experiences with her husband, Reeves, whom she divorced, then remarried. She tried to commit suicide after remarrying him but failed. Five years later, her husband tried to get her to commit suicide with him in their Paris hotel but she fled and Reeves died there from an overdose of sleeping pills. Her closest friends in Paris were Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote.