Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers was born in 1917. She was the critically acclaimed author of several popular novels in the 1940s and '50s, including The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, The Member of the Wedding, and Reflections in a Golden Eye. Her fiction frequently depicted life in small towns of the southeastern United States and were marked by themes of loneliness and spiritual isolation. McCullers suffered from ill health most of her adult life, including a series of strokes that began when she was in her twenties; she died at the age of fifty.