Carson McCullers
(1917 - 1967)
As a child in Georgia, Carson McCullers wanted to be a concert pianist. In 1932, after a bout with rheumatic fever, she decided she lacked the stamina for a concert career. Two years later she moved to New York to attend the Juilliard School of Music but instead embarked on a career as a writer. In 1938 she submitted an outline to Houghton Mifflin for its first novel contest; when The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was published two years later, it became a sensation. McCullers soon after separated from her husband and began living in a four-story Victorian house in Brooklyn Heights with W.H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Gypsy Rose Lee, and other artists.
