September 1, 2023
A Mellon Fellow in the Humanities, Dearborn draws on newly discovered letters and journals to write a big new biography of Carson McCullers. Prepub Alert.
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December 4, 2023
Biographer Dearborn (Ernest Hemingway) delivers a penetrating portrait of Southern novelist Carson McCullers (1917–1967) as a brilliant but difficult writer whose life was marred by alcoholism and illness, which began with an untreated strep throat infection she contracted sometime before age 20 that precipitated a series of strokes throughout her life. Dearborn describes how McCullers’s mother believed her daughter was destined for greatness even before she was born, a prophecy that came true after McCullers’s first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, was released to critical acclaim when she was just 23. Calling queerness “Carson’s defining trait as an artist,” Dearborn delves into McCullers’s tumultuous romantic life, which included getting married at age 19 to Reeve McCullers, with whom she maintained an on-and-off relationship as she pursued “older, more worldly women who sometimes returned her affection but who... seldom wanted the passionate physical relationship she sought.” Dearborn provides astute psychological insight into McCullers, describing her as a headstrong if “needy” writer who demanded “constant expressions of love,” and offers a tender depiction of her close friendship with Tennessee Williams, whom she met after he wrote her a letter of admiration and who helped take care of her after her second stroke left her partially paralyzed. This skillful biography satisfies. Photos. Agent: Georges Borchardt, Georges Borchardt, Inc.
Starred review from December 15, 2023
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.
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Starred review from January 1, 2024
Born Lula Carson Smith in Georgia in 1917, she cast off her despised first name at age 15. Tall, androgynous, and ardent with a unique sense of style, she was indulged by her family as she first embraced music as her passion and fell in love with a woman, her piano teacher, for the first time. Once she took up writing, she suppressed her taboo sexuality and married Reeves McCullers, a charming military man with his own literary ambitions. They also shared family histories rank with alcoholism, which would bedevil them both. In New York, Carson succeeded and Reeves did not. Their perpetually turbulent marriage, divorce, and remarriage propel this scrupulously researched and crafted, richly analytical, wrenching, and cacophonous saga of creativity, chaos, self-destruction, misery, and love. Carson achieved fame and notoriety, fell madly in love with unavailable women, counted among her circle Truman Capote, Janet Flanner, John Huston, Gypsy Rose Lee, Richard Wright, and Tennessee Williams, and struggled with debilitating health problems, dying at age 50. Dearborn deepens our appreciation for McCullers herself and her daring, resonant works, chronicling their writing and reception, including The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and A Member of the Wedding, each shaped by the author's profound understanding of "otherness," unbound imagination, lyricism, and "intensity." A landmark biography.
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