The life of Carson McCullers (1917-1967) rivals the plot of any of her stories. She had a painful small-town childhood in the South and shot from obscurity to international fame at the age of 23 with the publication of her first novel, "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter". Despite a mysterious and debilitating disease that haunted her from early adulthood, she went on the write works such as "The Member of the Wedding", "Reflections in a Golden Eye" and "The Ballad of Sad Cafe", adapted for Broadway and the cinema. She was a controversial figure, whose immense emotional needs sometimes overshadowed her great charm and deep intelligence, while her search for happiness led her to marry the same man twice. She surrounded herself with a large cast of the brightest celebrities of her time: Katherine Anne Porter, Truman Capote, John Huston, Marlon Brando, W.H. Auden and Tennesse Williams, among others, Above all she was a life force, a person who had a relentless need to write and who did so despite great physical pain, up until her untimely death at the age of 50. Josyane Savigneau's portrait provides a look at, arguably, one of the most enigmatic literary figures of the 20th century.
Savigneau's biography is a great introduction to the life and writing of Carson McCullers. The book follows a logical timeline and tries to explore different angles of McCullers' personality. However, there are some questions that I have acquired from reading McCullers' works that are not addressed or are only glanced at, and this describes one of the problems I have with this biography. Much of my interest in McCullers is derived from her writing, and while Savigneau's book is a solid biography, it didn't go deep enough into McCullers' work for my taste.
The second problem I have with the book is that it is now out-dated. The book was originally published in 1995 (28 years after McCullers' death) and one would have thought that enough research into her life and writing would have been done by 1995, but not so.
McCullers own, tho unfinished, autobiography Illuminations and Night Glare was not published until 1999, and there is at least one other book (Schwarzenbach's Das Wunder des Baums / The Miracle of the Tree) that is referred to in Savigneau's work that was published after this biography.
Still, this is a good basic reference to McCullers' life and work.
