In 1937, an unconventional woman moved to Charlotte and began working on her best-selling novel. Eighty years later, it’s hard not to wonder whether she’d be accepted here today
ON A CHILLY AFTERNOON some time ago, a 20-something writer, ask of sherry concealed in a pocket, walked the streets of Charlotte in search of material to use in her novel.
As in other novels with a strong sense of place and time, the city would serve as a character in the story—its smells, sounds, and sights as evocative and informative as any person.
Carson McCullers spent the fall of 1937 through the spring of 1938 living here, as she drafted the outline and first chapters of her debut novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. The book became an instant best seller in 1940, launching McCullers into a Bohemian-literary-Brooklyn fame that involved splitting rent with Gypsy Rose Lee after she moved to Brooklyn and having Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe over for dinner.
McCullers was 23 when she moved to Charlotte, and her time here sounds an awful lot like some creative Charlotte millennial’s stories 80 years later. She was a newlywed, fresh off a quirky wedding at her childhood home in Columbus, Georgia— Carson wore green for the ceremony. She and her husband, Reeves, made their first home together here, a big city compared to the small Georgia towns where they’d grown up and met. With dreams of New York City or Paris or both, they didn’t plan on staying long.
In Charlotte, Carson and Reeves, both aspiring writers, struck the hopeful deal of the young, artistic, and in love: Carson would work on her book for a year while Reeves worked a dull insurance job that supported them both. They’d switch roles every year. Their handicap on the eve of World War II wasn’t student loans, but wartime military service for Reeves, and their apartment options did not offer pet spas or rooftop pools.
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