It’s the birthday of Carson McCullers, probably best known for her novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, considered by many to be one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. McCullers was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia, in 1917. At age 17 she went to New York City and eventually studied creative writing at Columbia and New York University (early dreams of studying at Julliard and being a concert pianist were thwarted by rheumatic fever). In 1937 she married James Reeves McCullers Jr., also a writer. Their relationship was complicated and dysfunctional, and though Reeves supported her writing early on, he also envied her for it. In 1940 The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was published, and in 1941 she and Reeves divorced. (McCullers was not easy to live with: one friend said, “You had to like burdens to love Carson, and many of us could not afford her emotionally or economically.”)

By then McCullers had returned to New York City and was living with George Davis, literary editor of Harper’s Bazaar, and the poet W.H. Auden and hanging with the likes of composer Benjamin Britten, performer Gypsy Lee Rose, and author Richard Wright. She reconciled temporarily with Reeves but then they both fell temporarily in love with composer David Diamond which (this will shock you) led to more estrangement—although also temporary, since they remarried in 1945. Her novel The Member of the Wedding came out in 1946, inspired in part by the love triangle she’d experienced. (McCullers adapted the novel into a highly successful play for Broadway in 1950.) McCullers also aggressively pursued a number of relationships with women but was frustrated time and again when none of her love interests reciprocated. After WWII, McCullers lived in Paris, where she was friends with Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams, and in the early 50s Reeves tried to get her to commit suicide with him. McCullers fled and Reeves eventually killed himself with an overdose of sleeping pills.

McCullers knew a great deal of emotional and physical pain in her short life; in addition to the rheumatic fever, she had a series of strokes by the age of 30 which left her entirely paralyzed on her left side. She was also prone to psychosomatic disorders. Her greatest works were accomplished quite young (in addition to the novels listed above, these would include the novel Reflections in a Golden Eye, 1941, and the novella and six stories collected in The Ballad of the Sad Café: The Novels and Stories of Carson McCullers, 1951). Her later work declined in quality. Of her novel Clock without Hands (1961), fellow southern writer Flannery O’Connor wrote in a letter to a friend, “I believe it is the worst book I have ever read.” (To be fair, O’Connor was not a fan of McCullers’ work, and anyway was not one to mince words.) McCullers died of a brain hemorrhage in 1967 in Nyack, New York, where she had lived for years with her mother.

It’s also the birthday of Amy Tan, born in 1952, known for her novels about Chinese-American women. If you can read The Joy Luck Club (1989) or see the film without weeping copiously at the end, then you, my friend, have a heart of stone. More on Tan next year.

Have a reasonably bearable Monday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.