Status Updates From Carson McCullers: A Life

'Carson began her final push on the novel around 1955, when fourteen year old Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi and Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus.'

'When asked by reporters for her views on race, she often said she was going to address those issues in her next novel, Clock Without Hands. She had always felt that as a Southern writer, she had a special imperative to address race, especially in light of the mounting civil rights battles there '

Elizabeth Bowen: 'I always felt Carson was a destroyer.'

'Carson and Truman [Capote] became - for this spring, at least - inseparable.'

'There was some unpleasantness about [Richard] Wright and his white wife; the African American furnace man refused to work in a house where a Black man lived with a white woman. [WH] Auden told the worker to get out and Carson was indignant. A few times someone threw stones at the Wrights' windows.'

'Eudora [Welty] and Katherine Anne [Porter] had been exchanging complaints about Carson, calling her latest Reflections in a Golden I.'

'She grabbed Gypsy [Rose Lee]'s arm, she later said, and out of breath, gasped, "Frankie is in love with the bride of her brother and wants to join the wedding".'

'[Edwin Peacock] introduced her to Marx and Engels and to the literature of social protest, pointing her towards the work of John Dos Passos... She was for a time passionate about Marxism.'

'[Mccullers] told a friend that the South had an evil quality that scared her. She left no doubt that she was talking about race in directing her friend to follow news discussions of the poll tax. These taxes restricted African American voting. Southerners, she said, we're passing laws like this that conflicted with the Constitution.'
~ The notes date this to c.1943 in a letter to Bessie Breuer

'She seemed sui generous, unique, and as it turned out, as odd as some of her characters.'