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Childhood and Education

Lula Carson, as she was called until age fourteen, attended public schools and graduated from Columbus High School at sixteen. An unremarkable student, Carson preferred the more solitary study of the piano. Encouraged by her mother, who was convinced that her daughter was destined for greatness, Carson began formal piano study at age nine, but was forced to give up her dream of a career as a concert pianist after a childhood case of rheumatic fever left her without the physical stamina necessary for the rigors of practice and a concert career. While recuperating from this illness Carson began to read voraciously and to consider writing as a vocation.

In 1935, at age seventeen, Carson sailed from Savannah to New York City, ostensibly to study piano at the Juilliard School of Music but actually to pursue her secret ambition to write. Working various jobs to support herself, Carson studied creative writing at Columbia University and at Washington Square College of New York University. Back in Columbus in the fall of 1936 to recover from a respiratory infection, Carson was bedridden several months during which time she began work on her first novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Her first short story, "Wunderkind," was published in the December 1936 issue of Story magazine, edited by Whit Burnett, her former teacher at Columbia.

Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians, 1519 Stark Avenue, Columbus, Georgia, 31906

(706) 568-2054

Created By Patricia Gilbert