McCullers was a brilliant but pampered writer, one who never quite grew up.
Throughout her life, the novelist Carson McCullers struck observers as preternaturally young. The biographer Leon Edel, who met her when she was thirty-seven, remarked on her "childish wonder."The French novelist Françoise Sagan wrote that she had the “laugh of a child forever lost." Like a child, she loved sweets, Christmas, and receiving presents on her birthday. Though she was tall a "slender wand of a girl," in the words of her protégé turned rival, Truman Capote-she was often described as "little": "an odd little 22-year old," a "little star."
If seemingly everyone agreed that McCullers was a child, they indulged her because she was a genius. The author of four novels, one novella, two plays, and sundry short stories and poems, McCullers ascended to literary fame when she was only twenty-three. Her début novel, "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter," wowed critics, who crowned her Faulkner's successor. In the decades that followed, McCullers devoted herself entirely to her work, relying on alcohol and an active fantasy life for inspiration. She relied, too, on a rotating cast of friends and family members, who cooked her meals, poured her drinks, listened to "her self-loving arias," and tucked her into bed at night. The playwright Tennessee Williams, McCullers's closest friend, thought she could be demanding, but he also thought that "when you remember the poetry of her work, you feel differently about her, appreciate her isolation and her longings, and you forgive her selfishness."
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der March 04, 2024-Ausgabe von The New Yorker.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der March 04, 2024-Ausgabe von The New Yorker.
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GREAT MIGRATIONS
\"Home\" and \"What Became of Us.\"
SICK, SAD WORLD
What COVID did to fiction.
MOVE IN FOR THE CULL
The complicated calculus of killing some wild creatures to protect others.
EVERYTHING IN HAND
The C.I.A.'s covert ops have mattered-but not in the way that it hoped.
CHICAGO ON THE SEINE CAMILLE BORDAS
I used to tell myself stories on the job, to make it feel exciting—spy stories, exfiltration stories, war stories. I used to come up with poignant little details that turned the repatriation cases I worked on into “Saving Private Ryan,” into “Johnny Got His Gun.”
A SEMBLANCE OF PEACE
How life in a co-living community changed after October 7th.
HIS BEAUTIFUL DARK TWISTED FANTASY
Ye bought a masterpiece by Tadao Ando-and gave it a violent remix.
SCREEN GRAB
How CoComelon conquered children's television.
FOND OF FLAGS
My wife is fond of fast food. I am not. My wife is particularly fond of the Wendy’s Baconator. I argue that it’s less expensive to order a Dave’s Double with a side of bacon, then put your own pretzels on top. (I’m fond of the Rold Gold Tiny Twists Original.)
TROPHY ROOM
Going on safari.