From Thomas Paine to Ernest Hemingway, our class has by now studied American literary giants from just about every time period. I would have to say, however, that the one author that truly stole my heart--Southern Gothic Carson McCullers--was someone I learned about outside of class: I read two of her novels, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and The Member of the Wedding, in preparation for our spring semester research paper. (Just the fact that I voluntarily read an additional 300+ page novel for this project should say something...)
One of the reasons that I enjoyed reading McCullers was that I found her writing easy to understand verbally, but still complex and engaging. With the impossibly long sentence structures of Hawthorne, I found myself repeatedly reading one paragraph just to retain key ideas. With McCullers's more lyrical and minimalistic style, I reread simply because I wanted to.
McCullers embodies the typical Southern Gothic writer in her depiction of grotesque and flawed characters in dysfunctional small town settings. She recreates the feeling of human isolation with poignancy, and her character studies are sketched with accuracy and insight. (At the top, I included a picture of Edward Hopper's painting Nighthawks, which visually displays the loneliness of Americans that McCullers also portrayed.)
In a way, McCullers's writings fit right in with the modernists: she shares their disillusionment and fundamental, well, pessimism. However, surreal settings and bizarre plot events make her works unique, even among those of other Southern Gothic authors. Despite a narrow range of subjects, McCullers's work is deeply moving. Its only "flaw" is a complete lack of redemption and renewal for her characters: each of them seems to lead a permanently nightmarish existence that they can't escape for more than a few seconds at a time.
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