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Home > Start Here > Georgia > Columbus
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COLUMBUS: CARSON McCULLERS
The young Carson McCullers dropped a final curtain on her sitting-room shows "when I first discovered Eugene O'Neill." She was introduced to O'Neill at the Columbus library, and shortly afterwards, she put the gentle family plays of her childhood behind her. By age sixteen, McCullers had written her first short story, Sucker, and at twenty-three, she published her first novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Columbus is undeniably a character in the novel. Nearby Fort Benning plays an unidentified role in her second novel, Reflections in a Golden Eye. Columbus overlooks the
Chattahoochee River where the waterway separates the Alabama and
Georgia borders. Before the Civil War, the riverport connected the
plantations of the region to the international cotton market, and
the city prospered into one of the South's most important industrial
towns. Industry helped Columbus to survive Reconstruction with a
financial health
Like the rest of the nation, however, Columbus suffered during the Great Depression. McCullers never forgot the suffering she witnessed during her childhood. In The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, McCullers writes of factories - cotton mills - whose workers bear "the desperate look of hunger and loneliness." Young Lula Carson Smith also struggled with the injustices of racial segregation, another theme within The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and The Member of the Wedding. She lived briefly and died at fifty from the series of strokes that began during her youth; she contracted rheumatic fever at the age of fifteen. During her life, as after it, Carson Smith McCullers received great praise for her work from her peers, audiences and readers.
Tennessee Williams and Carson McCullers were close friends. In 1946, they summered together in a cottage on Nantucket. As he wrote Summer and Smoke at one end of the dining room table, she wrote the stage version of Member of the Wedding at the other. Williams wrote McCullers from Italy on February 8, 1948, with passages that reflect the emotional depth of their friendship: Whenever you are strong enough you must come back here and join me. I say here in Europe for I feel that this is the place for us both, especially here in Italy, this place of soft weather and golden light and of great bunches of violets and carnations sold on every corner and the Greek ideal surviving so tangibly in the grace and beauty of the people and the antique sculpture as well.
Today the hometown of Carson McCullers is a travel destination for bountiful gardens, Greek Revival homes and classic Americana. Columbus celebrates its rich African-American history with Black Heritage tours that include the home of "Ma" Rainey, the "Mother of the Blues." The Smith-McCullers House is operated by Columbus State University as both a museum and a place to celebrate the writer who once staged her plays behind the sliding doors that separated the sitting rooms. From her beginnings as an artist in the Stark Avenue house, McCullers appreciated the human condition. In the words of Richard Wright, another admirer and friend, she had an ability to "embrace white and black humanity in one sweep of apprehension and tenderness."
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In our old Georgia home we used to
have two sitting rooms -- a back one and a front one -- with folding
doors between. These were the family living rooms and the theatre of
my shows. The front sitting room was the auditorium, the back
sitting-room the stage. The sliding doors the curtain.
Carson McCullers, writing about her home at 1519 Stark
Avenue, Columbus.
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