“Miss McCullers and perhaps Mr Faulkner are the only writers since the death of D.H. Lawrence with an original poetic sensibility. I prefer Miss McCullers to Mr Faulkner because she writes more clearly; I prefer her to D. H. Lawrence because she has no message.” - Graham Greene

Carson McCullers was born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1917. Always a delicate person, as a young adult she began experiencing strokes and at the age of thirty-one her entire left side was paralysed. For a while she could only use one finger to type, and for years before her death, her sister reported, she could not sit and work. In 1938 she married James Reeves McCulllers, a corporal in the US army. The marriage was not a success and they divorced. They continued to keep in touch and subsequently remarried, separating finally in 1953; he later committed suicide.

She was established as a writer by the time she reached her twenties, but it was not until she published The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, when she was twenty-three, that she won widespread recognition. The Member of the Wedding won the New York Critics Award in 1950 and was staged as a play at the Royal Court Theatre, London. She was made a Guggenheim fellow in 1942-3 and again in 1946. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she also received an award from them in 1945. She lived in Nyack, New York, until her death in 1967.