CARSON MCCULLERS
A Life
Josyane Savigneau
£25.00
This passionate and arresting biography of one of America's greatest female writers is the first to be written with the full cooperation of the McCullers estate.
In 1932, at the age of 15, Lula Carson McCullers was given a typewriter and fell gravely ill with a mysterious disease - two events that would ahnage her life forever. Eight years later she shot from the obscurity of her small town childhood in the South to international fame with the publication of her first novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, which led to her acclaim as 'the voice of the decade'. Despite the debilitating rheumatic fever that haunted her, she went on to write such classics as The Member of the Wedding, Reflections in a Golden Eye and The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, which were adapted for Broadway and the cinema. 'Writing is my occupation,' McCullers often said. 'I must do it.'
A controversial character, Carson McCullers's immense emotional needs sometimes overshadwoed her reat charm, generosity, loyalty and deep intelligence,while her search for happiness led her to marry the same husband twice. She wrote of the loneliness of the human condition but surrounded herself with a large cast of the brightest celebrities of her time, including Katherine Anne Porter, Truman Capote, John Huston, Marlon Brando, WH Auden and Tennessee Williams. Above all she was a reat life force, a person who wrote despite great physical pain, until her untimely death at the age of fifty.
Josyane Savigneau
editor in chief of the cultural pagesin Le Monde, is the author of Marerite Yourcenar: Inventing a Life, acclaimed in the New York Times Book Review as 'surely the best biography to be written in French in several decades.'
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