Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers (1917–1967) was born in Columbus. Five of her books—The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941), The Member of the Wedding (1946), The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951), and Clock Without Hands (1961)—established her reputation, according to many, as a significant twentieth-century American writer. Her stage adaptation of The Member of the Wedding opened on Broadway in 1950, won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for best American play of the season, and enjoyed a run of over five hundred performances. For many years McCullers lived on the Hudson River in Nyack, New York, where she died after a long series of debilitating strokes. (Inducted as a charter member in 2000)