At the same time, Shapland began reflecting on being a queer woman who struggled with her own identity. Mary Mercer and love letters from McCullers to Mercer. There, she came across eight letters from Swiss writer, photographer and bon vivant Annemarie Schwarzenbach to McCullers that certainly seemed to Shapland like love letters.įurther research yielded extraordinary transcripts of McCullers’ recorded therapy sessions with Dr. This was the image Jenn Shapland, then a grad student in English at the University of Texas, knew about vaguely when - as an intern at the Harry Ransom Center in 2012 - she started engaging with McCullers’ legacy. When you look at a resource as publicly facing (and as publicly sourced) as Wikipedia, her entry insists McCullers “fell in love with a number of women and pursued them sexually with great aggression, but seems not to have succeeded in having sex with any of them.” (There is no citation for this sentence.) When I was an undergraduate in the early and mid-1990s, I recall my peers and I thinking of her as a queer author - even though she was married (twice) to a man (who himself had relationships with men and women) - who wrote about queer characters.Īs Hilton Als put it in the New Yorker in 2001: “Thanks to her compulsion for blurring the line between male and female in her work and in her personal life, she enjoyed an exalted status in a milieu dominated by gay editors and writers.”

Then there is the question of her sexuality. McCullers was friends and rivals with Tennessee Williams (whom she called “Tenn”) and Truman Capote (who probably lifted more than a little of her schtick).īut by the age of 31, a series of strokes had rendered her left side paralyzed she typed with one finger. Richard “Native Son” Wright said of the novel: “To me the most impressive aspect of ‘The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter’ is the astonishing humanity that enables a white writer, for the first time in Southern fiction, to handle Negro characters with as much ease and justice as those of her own race.” American literature is still trying to figure out exactly what to do with Carson McCullers.Ī baby-faced sensation all of 23 years old when her debut, “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,” was published in 1940, McCullers earned accolades all over the place.

Jenn shapland carson mccullers