Conversations from the Cullman Center: Carson McCullers: Mary Dearborn with Bill Goldstein
The first major biography in more than twenty years of one of America’s greatest writers, based on newly available letters and journals
Carson McCullers was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia. Her dream was to become a concert pianist. As a child, she said she’d been “born a man.” At twenty, she married Reeves McCullers, with whom she had a fraught, tumultuous marriage that ended with his suicide in 1953. She yearned for attention, mostly from women who admired her but rebuffed her sexually. Her first novel—The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter—was published in 1940, when she was twenty-three, and overnight, Carson McCullers became the most widely talked about writer of the time. With unprecedented access to materials that have surfaced in the past decade, Mary Dearborn gives us the first full picture of this complex artist who was decades ahead of her time.
Mary Dearborn worked on Carson McCullers during her 2018-2019 Fellowship at the Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. She will discuss the book with critic and biographer Bill Goldstein.
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ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Mary V. Dearborn holds a doctorate in English and comparative literature from Columbia University, where she was a Mellon Fellow in the humanities. She is the author of seven books—among them, Mistress of Modernism: The Life of Peggy Guggenheim and Ernest Hemingway. She lives in Buckland, Massachusetts.
Bill Goldstein reviews books and interviews authors for NBC's Weekend Today in New York, and was the founding editor of the New York Times books website. A graduate of the University of Chicago, Goldstein received a PhD in English from the City University of New York Graduate Center. His book, The World Broke in Two: Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, and the Year that Changed Literature, was published in 2017. He is writing a biography of Larry Kramer, to be published by Crown, and worked on the book as a 2019–2020 fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.
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In-Person
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The Cullman Center is made possible by a generous endowment from Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman in honor of Brooke Russell Astor, with major support provided by Mrs. John L. Weinberg, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Estate of Charles J. Liebman, The von der Heyden Family Foundation, John and Constance Birkelund, and The Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation, and with additional gifts from Helen and Roger Alcaly, The Rona Jaffe Foundation, The Arts and Letters Foundation Inc., William W. Karatz, Merilee and Roy Bostock, and Cullman Center Fellows.