Carson McCullers: The Mill Town in Her Head
Near Columbus, Georgia
She was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus on February nineteenth, nineteen seventeen, in a city whose textile mills were at their peak and whose social order was fixed as the Piedmont granite under the fall line. Her father ran a jewelry store downtown. The family was comfortable, educated, Southern in a specific and slightly theatrical way. And from an early age, Carson, as she preferred, was something the town did not quite have a category for.
She was a pianist first. At seventeen she went to New York to study at Juilliard on money her parents had saved for years. On the subway from the ship terminal, carrying her tuition in cash, she lost it all. She never enrolled. She took odd jobs, enrolled in writing classes at Columbia instead, and never came back to Columbus to stay.
But Columbus never entirely left her. Her first novel, published in nineteen forty when she was twenty-three, was called The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. It is set in a nameless Georgia mill town in the Depression, a town that reads, to anyone who knows Columbus, as Columbus: the cafe on the main street, the deaf-mute who becomes the confessor for every misfit in town, the labor organizer who cannot find traction, the Black doctor navigating Jim Crow with fury and exhaustion, the twelve-year-old girl who plays piano and plans a life that the town cannot accommodate. McCullers was later explicit about the source material: Columbus was both the origin of her creative imagination and, in her words, an intolerable place to live.
The novel was an immediate critical success. She was compared to Faulkner. She wrote The Member of the Wedding next, then The Ballad of the Sad Cafe. She spent most of her adult life in New York and Europe, in circles that included Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote and W.H. Auden. She died in nineteen sixty-seven at fifty years old, after a decade of strokes.
Columbus State University now owns her childhood home. The Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians holds residencies there. The town that could not accommodate her has built a small institution around what she made of having left.
