Happy birthday, Carson McCullers

It is the birthday of writer Carson McCullers (1917), whose first novel was her best known. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940) tells the story of a lonely deaf man in a southern mill town in the 1930s and the people he encounters. She wrote it when she was 23 years old. It was adapted for film in 1968 and the stage in 2005. McCullers 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). She was friends with W.H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Gypsy Rose Lee, Truman Capote, and Tennessee Williams, who said of her work: “Carson's major theme: the huge importance and nearly insoluble problems of human love.”