About Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia, on Feb. 19, 1917. Most famous for her novels The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Reflections in a Golden Eye, The Member of the Wedding, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, and Clock Without Hands, McCullers was also a poet, playwright, essayist, and short story writer.

Her small but significant body of work includes five novels, two plays, 20 short stories, more than two dozen nonfiction pieces, a book of children's verse, a number of poems, and an unfinished autobiography.

McCullers's life was blighted by a series of cerebral strokes resulting from a misdiagnosed and untreated childhood case of rheumatic fever. The first stroke occurred when she was in her early twenties, and within several years, she was partially paralyzed on her left side. McCullers suffered a final stroke in August 1967 and died at age 50 on September 29, 1967.

In 1944, after Carson's father died at his jewelry shop in downtown Columbus, her mother sold the family home on Stark Avenue (now known as the Smith-McCullers House) and moved to Nyack, New York, where she bought the large, mansard-roof Victorian at 131 S. Broadway (now known as the Carson McCullers House). Initially, Carson lived with her mother and sister in this house, later, after the war, with her mother and her husband Reeves McCullers. Carson eventually bought the house from her mother and resided there until the time of her death in 1967. In December 2006, the Carson McCullers House was added to the National Register of Historic Places.