Joyce CarolOates: The Autobiography of Carson McCullers, 2 September 1999
Illumination and Night Glare: The Unfinished Autobiography of Carson McCullers edited by Carlos Dews.
Wisconsin, 256 pp., £19.95, September 1999, 0 299 16440 3Show More Show More“... The wedding was like a dream outside her power, or like a show unmanaged by her in which she was to have no part. The Member of the Wedding How to account for the vagaries of literary reputation? In the Forties and early Fifties, such disparate, talented young writers as Carson McCullers, Truman Capote and Flannery O’Connor were perceived as kindred; there was a highly publicised vogue of American Southern Gothic writing, abetted by photographs of the very camp Truman Capote reclining on a chaise-longue like a delicious dream of Oscar Wilde’s, and by lurid tales of the erratic, often inebriated behaviour of Carson McCullers, a literary prodigy to set beside Scott Fitzgerald in the previous generation ...”