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Literary Reputation, Honors, and Awards

Assessing McCullers' stature in American arts and letters, Virginia Spencer Carr wrote: "Critics continue to compare and contrast McCullers with Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, and Katherine Anne Porter, whom they generally consider to be better stylists in the short form than McCullers. They tend to rank McCullers above her female contemporaries as a novelist. McCullers herself had a keen appreciation of her own work without regard to the sex of those with whom she was compared." In an appraisal of her life and work accompanying McCullers' front-page obituary in the September 30, 1967, New York Times, Eliot Fremont-Smith wrote of the impact of her first novel in what could also be an assessment of McCullers' lasting influence: "It is not so much that the novel paved the way for what became the American Southern gothic genre, but that it at once encompassed it and went beyond it . . . . The heart of this remarkable, still powerful book is perhaps best conveyed by its title, with its sense of intensity, concision and mystery, with its terrible juxtaposition of love and aloneness, whose relation was Mrs. McCullers's constant subject . . . . Mrs. McCullers was neither prolific nor varying in her theme . . . . This is no fault or tragedy: to some artists a vision is given only once. And a corollary: only an artist can make others subject to the vision's force. Mrs. McCullers was an artist. She was also in her person, an inspiration and example for other artists who grew close to her. Her books, and particularly `The Heart,' will live; she will be missed."

In addition to the New York Drama Critics Circle and Donaldson awards for her play The Member of the Wedding (1950), McCullers also received two Guggenheim fellowships (1942, 1946), an Arts and Letters Grant from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1943), and various other awards and honors. McCullers was inducted into the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1952.

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

(706) 568-2054

Created By Patricia Gilbert