Carson's Literary Crowd

Tennessee Williams

Of all Carson McCullers's literary friendships, her close relationship with playwright Tennessee Williams was the most significant and lasting. There are several pieces of correspondence between the two that survive, and paint a portrait of very tender and devoted friends. Not only were they confidants, they also enjoyed a bond of mutual respect for one another's writing and writing process. It was this bond that spurred each of them, at times, to new heights in their own literary output.

In the summer and fall of 1948, at Williams' suggestion while they were vacationing together in Nantucket, McCullers revised her novella The Member of the Wedding into a play that later earned her fame on the Broadway stage. In the end, Williams was a lifelong supporter of Carson and her work. He called her second novel, Reflections in a Golden Eye a pure and powerful work "conceived in that Sense of the Awful that is the desperate black root of nearly all significant modern art." In a touching introduction to Virginia Spencer Carr's biography The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers Williams said this of his dear friend, "Carson's heart was often lonely and it was a tireless hunter for those to whom she could offer it, but it was a heart that was graced with light that eclipsed the shadows."