Carson McCullers
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Gaële Chojnowicz
Mrs. Trinci
English III
12 March 1998
Carson McCullers
Walter Allen said of Carson McCullers; ``Faulkner apart, the most remarkable novelist the South has produced seems to me Carson McCullers" (Allen 208). Her work is marked with the feeling of loneliness coming from her lonely childhood (spiritual isolation is the basis of most of her themes) and the music she always wanted to study. She wrote novels, short stories and dramas. In all she received the recognition of both the public, her fellows writers, and critics.
Carson McCullers is a talented Southern American writer who touched others with her ability to describe human complexity with a touch of poesy.
Carson is a precocious writer considered to be full of talent. She started to write at the age of 17 and published her first novel; The Heart is a Lonely Hunter at 22. She is immediately remarked by the ``maturity" of her writing. Even if she is very young Rosa Feld called her "a full-fledged novelist" (Feld 2373) and William P. Clancy said that she is ``a young American talent of the first order" (Clancy 2376). ``For a twenty-two-year-old girl to probe at such length the passionate idealism of half-dozen adult characters was an astonishing act of imaginative sympathy" (Graver 586).
She is appreciated for a ``great sensitivity" in describing the feelings of loneliness in both adults and teenagers (Hart 506). In her novel The Ballad of the Sad Café she successfully used the darkness ``to the service of a compelling and powerful literal truth" (Grave 210). She have a strong perception (feeling) of humanity in all its fears and its loneliness. She had a great understanding of people (Feld 2373).
She also had a remarkable imagination; ``She so surely plumb the hearts of characters as strange, and under the force of her creative shaping, as real as she presents" (Feld 2373). She is ``able to persuade us that contemporary reality and legendary story are one" (Graver 209). The worlds she created are imaginary but in their ``depth and variety" can look like the reality (Allen 208).
A lot of critics speak about the poetic aspect of her work and think that ``With her, the Southern tradition of the Gothic novel is refined into a poetic sensibility which has not escaped either imitation or misuse" (Hassan 506). Even if her novels are all in prose and ``not in any obvious sense poetic" (Allen 208), ``from its first appearance, critics have recognized the Lyricism of the McCullers narrative style, which can render even sordid subject matter in poetic terms" (Griffith 209). This come from her first vocation which was music. One can find this constant presence of music in her novels: ballad and Negro song. This is a part of the spirit of the deep South she described in her work.
As she was born in Georgia and most of her novels take place in the South, she is always connected with this region. Some people called her work gothic because of her characters who all have a physical or psychological deficiency. Gothic is a style of writing that grew in the south with authors as William Faulkner, Earnest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. She is very often associated with all these well-known writers. ``With a touch reminiscent of Faulkner but peculiarly her own" style (Feld 2373). William P. Clancy went further when is give her work a ``metaphysical" level. He was mostly astonished by the way she brought together feelings as ``horror and compassion", and also how she used them as symbols (Clancy 2376).
Tennessee William asked her to dramatized her novel The Member of the Wedding which she did in 1950. It soon became ``the most successful play of the 1950 theatrical season". "On the night of June 5, 1950, The Member of the Wedding opened at the Empire Theater in New York to the extravagant praise of the audience and newspaper critics" (Graver 587). Consecration the next year when she received both the Donaldson Award and the New York Drama Critics Prize (Kunitz 610-611). And after 501 performances "it was made into a motion picture" directed by Stanley Kramer in 1952 (Graver 587). Most of her major works had also been adapted in movies: Reflections in a Golden Eye in 1967, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter in 1968, and The Ballad of the Sad Café ``was dramatized by Edward Albee in 1963"(Collins).
She won a lot of awards and was fully recognized by her contemporaries as a exceptional writer. Dayton Kohler designated her as a natural ``born writer" (Kunitz 610). V.S. Pritchett, her British editor, called her ```a genius...and the most remarkable novelist to come out of America for a generation"'. ```An American legend from the beginning"' says the Gore Vidal's recollection in 1953. She received the O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories in 1942 for A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud, the Martha Foley's Best American Short Stories in 1944 for The Ballad of the Sad Café (Graver 587), and two Guggenheim awards (Kunitz 611). She was also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (Graver 587).
Carson McCullers is an author who can create a world where fear and loneliness are truly expressed. She is not one of the most optimistic American writers but she has a true understanding of humanity it why sha is considered a great American writer.
WORK CITED
Allen, Walter. The Modern Novel. EP Dutton & Co., Inc., 1964. Rtp. Riley, Carolyn, ed. ``McCullers". Contemporary Literacy Criticism. vol 1. MI: Gale Research Company, 1973. 208.
Clancy, William P. Com. June 15. 1951. 218. Rtp. ``McCullers". Twentieth-Century American Literature. Harold Bloom, ed. vol 4. NY: Chelsea House, 1986. 2376.
Collins, Marjorie. ``McCullers, Carson". Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia. Grolier Interactive Inc., 1998.
Feld, Rosa. ``A Remarkable first Novel of Lonely Lives". NYTBR. 16 June 1940. 6. Rtp. "McCullers". Twentieth-Century American Literature. Harold Bloom, ed. vol 4. NY: Chelsea House, 1986. 2373.
Graver, Lawrence. ``Carson McCullers". University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers. No 84. University of Minnesota Press. 1969. Rtp. Riley, Carolyn, ed. ``McCullers". Contemporary Literacy Criticism. vol 1. MI: Gale Research Company, 1973. 209-210.
Graver, Lawrence. ``Carson McCullers". American Writers: A Collection of Literary Biographies. Unger, Leonard ed. vol 2 . NY: Scribner, 1974. 586-587.
Griffith, Albert J. ``Carson McCullers'Myth of the Sad Café". Georgia Review. Spring, 1967. 46-56. Rtp. Riley, Carolyn, ed. "McCullers". Contemporary Literacy Criticism. vol 1. MI: Gale Research Company, 1973. 209.
Hart, James D. ``McCullers". The Oxford Companion to American Literature. Fourth Edition. NY: Oxford University Press, 1965. 506.
Hassan, Ihab. ``The Character of Post-War Fiction in America". English Journal. January 1962. 1-8. Rtp. Riley, Carolyn, ed."McCullers". Contemporary Literacy Criticism. vol 1. MI: Gale Research Company, 1973. 208.
Kunitz, Stanley J. ed. ``McCullers". Twentieth Century Authors: A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Literature. NY: The HW Wilson Company, 1955. 610-611.
