Former Apartment of Carson McCullers

Introduction

Text-to-speech Audio

Though she grew up in Columbus, Georgia, and much of her fiction was set in the South, Carson McCullers spent a good portion of her adult life in New York City. In 1940, she and her husband, Reeves McCullers, moved into the apartment at 321 West 11th Street in the Village. McCullers's first book, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, had just been published and McCullers was seen as a literary wunderkind.

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Carson McCullers

The former home of McCullers

Backstory and Context

Text-to-speech Audio

Lula Carson Smith was born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1917. She was a talented and somewhat eccentric young girl who was doted on by her parents. She left Georgia at seventeen and traveled to New York to study at Juilliard, after her family sold an heirloom to pay her way there. Once in the city, her money was stolen on the subway and after working a few menial jobs, she returned to Columbus to recuperate from an illness and began to rethink her choic of vocation. After some time at home, she returned to the city and began to study writing at Columbia and NYU.

McCullers published her first short story in 1936 and the following year, she married an aspiring writer, Reeves McCullers. The couple moved to North Carolina soon after marrying and lived there for two years while McCullers wrote Reflections in a Golden Eye. Soon after, her first novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, was published. Its publication made her, at the age of 23, a literary sensation. The couple moved to Greenwich Village just prior to the book's publication in 1940.

The marriage--and their time in the city--was tempestuous. It was marked by infidelity by both Carson and Reeves, alcoholism, frequent moves, and suicide attempts. In 1941, she suffered her first cerebral stroke (poor health would plague her throughout her life) and she and Reeves divorced.

Carson and Reeves would eventually remarry and eventually move into a house in Nyack, where they lived until Reeves's suicide in 1953. Though the couple traveled often between New York and Paris, and Carson often returned to Georgia to recuperate from various illnesses, the Nyack house was the most stable and long-term home in the writer's life, aside from her childhood home in Columbus.

Carson, who suffered several strokes over the course of her life, was left paralyzed on her left side at the age of 31. Her already poor health, which was exacerbated by her alcoholism, continued to decline during the last two decades of her life. She died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1967 at the age of 50.

Sources

Carson McCullers , Georgia Writers Hall of Fame . Accessed January 31st 2021. https://georgiawritershalloffame.org/honorees/carson-mccullers.

Author Property Tour: 321 West 11th Street, Julianne Bond Team. October 23rd 2020. Accessed January 31st 2021. https://thejuliannebondteam.com/2020/10/23/author-property-tour-321-west-11th-street/.

Berman, Andrew. 31 Literary Icons of Greenwich Village , 6sqft. December 6th 2019. Accessed January 31st 2021. https://www.6sqft.com/31-literary-icons-of-greenwich-village/.

Kendrick-Holmes, Dimon. Here's a Timeline of Carson McCullers' Life , Columbus Ledger-Enquirer. January 13th 2017. Accessed January 31st 2021. https://www.ledger-enquirer.com/news/local/article126496684.html.