Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter | 1940 |
| Reflections in a Golden Eye | 1941 |
| The Member of the Wedding | 1946 |
| Clock Without Hands | 1961 |
Publication Order of Short Story Collections
| The Ballad of the Sad Café | 1951 |
| The Mortgaged Heart | 1971 |
Publication Order of Plays
| The Member of the Wedding: A Play | 1951 |
| The Square Root of Wonderful | 1958 |
Publication Order of Children’s Books
| Sweet as a Pickle and Clean as a Pig | 1964 |
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
| Illumination and Night Glare | 1999 |
About Carson McCullers
Carson McCullers (1917 to 1967) was an American novelist, short story writer and playwright whose fiction is set mostly in the Deep South. She is best known for “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter”, “The Member of the Wedding” and the novella “The Ballad of the Sad Café”, books about isolation and unreturned love among small-town misfits and outcasts.
She was born Lula Carson Smith on 19 February 1917 in Columbus, Georgia, the daughter of a jeweller. She took piano lessons from the age of ten and at 17 left for New York intending to study at the Juilliard School of Music, but rheumatic fever ended her hopes of a concert career and she turned to writing. She studied creative writing at Columbia University and at New York University, and her first published story, “Wunderkind”, appeared in Story magazine in 1936. In 1937 she married Reeves McCullers.
“The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter” was published in 1940, when she was 23. Richard Wright, reviewing it, praised the ease and justice with which a white Southern writer had drawn her Black characters. “Reflections in a Golden Eye”, written in two months and first serialised in Harper’s Bazaar, followed in 1941. “The Member of the Wedding” (1946) describes the feelings of a young girl at her brother’s wedding; McCullers adapted it for Broadway in 1950, where it ran for 501 performances and won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award.
Her health was poor throughout her adult life. Rheumatic heart disease led to a series of strokes that began in her youth, and she also suffered from alcoholism. She and Reeves divorced in 1941, remarried in 1945, and he killed himself in Paris in 1953. Her second play, “The Square Root of Wonderful”, opened in 1957, and her last novel, “Clock Without Hands”, appeared in 1961.
McCullers died in Nyack, New York, on 29 September 1967, aged 50, after a brain haemorrhage. John Huston’s film of “Reflections in a Golden Eye”, with Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor, was released that year, and a film of “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter” followed in 1968. Edward Albee adapted “The Ballad of the Sad Café” for the stage. A posthumous collection, “The Mortgaged Heart”, was edited by her sister, and her unfinished autobiography, “Illumination and Night Glare”, was published in 1999.
Photo: Carl Van Vechten, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).