She was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia. Her dream was to become a concert pianist, though she'd been writing since she was sixteen and the influence of music was evident throughout her work. As a child, she said she'd been "born a man." At twenty, she married Reeves McCullers, a fellow southerner, ex-soldier, and aspiring writer. They had a fraught, tumultuous marriage lasting twelve years and ending with his suicide in 1953. Her first novel was published in 1940, when she was twenty-three, and overnight, Carson McCullers became the most widely talked about writer of the time. Now, with unprecedented access to the cache of materials that has surfaced in the past decade, Mary Dearborn gives us the first full picture of this brilliant, complex artist who was decades ahead of her time, a writer who understood-and captured-the heart and longing of the outcast.