American writer Carson McCullers was BOTD in 1917. Born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia, she moved to New York City at 17, intending to study music at Juilliard. After losing her tuition money on the subway, she decided to become a writer, attending night school at Columbia University while working a series of menial jobs. She published her first story in 1936, and married ex-soldier Reeves McCullers the following year. Dividing their time between New York and Columbus, they took turns to earn money to support themselves by writing. Her first novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter was published in Harper’s Bazaar magazine in 1940. A Gothic tale about a mute man who befriends a series of lonely outcasts in a small Southern town, it became an immediate bestseller, catapulting McCullers to literary celebrity. Her novellas Reflections in a Golden Eye, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe and The Member of the Wedding continued her interest in misfits and outsiders who are isolated by conservative small-town society. She was also praised for her well-rounded and humane portrayals of Black characters. After divorcing Reeves in 1941, she returned to New York, living in February House in Brooklyn, a queer artists’ commune with housemates Gypsy Rose Lee, W. H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears, Paul and Jane Bowles, Erika, Klaus and Golo Mann, Lincoln Kirstein and Leonard Bernstein. After World War Two she moved to Paris, befriending Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams, and had a relationship with composer David Diamond. She developed obsessive crushes on a number of women, including Lee, Swiss photographer Annemarie Schwarzenbach and writer Katherine Anne Porter, though it’s unclear whether her feelings were reciprocated. In 1945, she remarried Reeves. After an unsuccessful lone suicide attempt in 1948, she and Reeves planned to commit suicide together. Carson fled at the last minute, leaving Reeves to die alone in their Paris hotel. She suffered throughout her life from rheumatic heart disease and struggled with alcoholism, dying in 1967 aged 50. Now considered one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century, her work has been frequently adapted for theatre and film.