Mary V. Dearborn recounts this incident in her new biography, Carson McCullers: A Life. The eureka moment in the street, what McCullers later called an “illumination,” was a creative spark ...

America’s abhorrence of homosexuality in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s is at the core of “Carson McCullers: A Life,” a carefully researched and smartly rendered literary biography by Mary V.