Carefully researched and smartly rendered ... In this extraordinary biography, Dearborn brings Carson McCullers to life, revealing the debilitating physical ailments and near-constant psychic torment she had to conquer to produce four works of fiction imbued with some of the most emotionally sensitive poetic prose ever produced in American letters — a testament to why McCullers will live on as a unique and enduring artist.
The time is ripe...for a more clear-eyed appraisal ... Mary V. Dearborn delivers. Dearborn, the author of six prior biographies...approaches her subject with admiration...and also with a healthy skepticism.
It is competent and professional, as if built from solid pine and good plaster. It is dispassionate and well researched. Reading it is brutal because McCullers’s life was brutal to endure ... earborn’s style is clean; we’re in a doctor’s office or a museum, and McCullers’s life is in a lighted display box ... A necessary book, though. It builds on Carr’s work and considers newly released material, including letters and journals and, most tantalizingly, transcripts of McCullers’s late-life psychiatric sessions with the female doctor who would become her lover and gatekeeper.
