Carson McCullers was born in 1917. She is the critically acclaimed author of several popular
novels in the 1940s and '50s including The Member of the Wedding (1946). Her novels 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 20s she died at the age of 50.
The Member of the Wedding was dramatized for the stage in the 1950s and filmed in 1952 and
1997. Other films based on her books are Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967 with Elizabeth
Taylor and Marlon Brando) The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1968 starring Alan Arkin) and The
Ballad of the Sad Caf¿i> (1991).
