Since carson McCullers’ gifts as a novelist are essentially celebratory and elegiac, it is appropriate that the simple facts of her life should evoke both wonder and melancholy. She was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia, on February 19, 1917, of French Huguenot and Irish ancestry. Lamar Smith, her father, had come a few years earlier from Society Hill, Alabama; her mother, Marguerite Waters, had been born in Dublin, Georgia.

From an early age, Carson was recognized as an odd, lonely girl of uncommon talents and her parents tried to be especially sensitive to her needs. When, at five,...