American · 1917–1967
Carson McCullers wrote about loneliness with a precision that bordered on cruelty. Her 1940 debut "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter"—published when she was twenty-three—introduced a deaf mute to whom an entire Georgia town confesses, establishing her territory: Southern grotesques yearning for connection. The American author's subsequent novels and stories continued to examine the unbridgeable distances between people. Illness plagued her adult life; she died at fifty after a series of strokes. Her fiction endures as a master class in rendering isolation.