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Marriage and New York

In September 1937, Carson married James Reeves McCullers, Jr., a native of Wetumpka, Alabama (born August 11, 1913), whom she met when Reeves was in the army stationed at Fort Benning, near Carson's hometown. The marriage was simultaneously the most supportive and destructive relationship in her life, and was from its beginning plagued by the partners' shared difficulty with alcoholism, their sexual ambivalence and the tension caused by Reeves's envy of Carson's writing abilities. Moving to New York in 1940 when The Heart is a Lonely Hunter was published, Carson and Reeves divorced in 1941, but reconciled and remarried in 1945.

During a separation from Reeves in 1940, Carson moved into a house in Brooklyn Heights owned by George Davis (literary editor of Harper's Bazaar) and shared with the British poet W. H. Auden. This house, located at 7 Middagh Street, became the center of a bohemian literary and artistic constellation including Gypsy Rose Lee, Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears, Richard Wright, and Oliver Smith. In the spring of 1941, Carson and Reeves, who were temporarily reconciled, both fell in love with the American composer David Diamond. This complicated love triangle led to Carson and Reeves's second separation and found articulation in the love-triangle theme found in McCullers' novella The Ballad of the Sad Cafe and her novel/play The Member of the Wedding. Following her father's sudden death in August of 1944, Carson with her mother and sister moved to Nyack, New York where Mrs. Smith purchased a house. McCullers spent most of the rest of her life in this house on the Hudson River.

While living near Paris in the early 1950s, Reeves tried to convince Carson to commit suicide with him. Fearing for her life, Carson fled to the United States. Remaining behind, Reeves committed suicide in a Paris hotel room in November 1953.

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

(706) 568-2054

Created By Patricia Gilbert