When Lula Carson Smith graduated from high school in Columbus, Georgia, she went off to study at the Julliard in New York City, an immensely different sort of place from her hometown. Back in the late '60s I lived for a time in Columbus, Georgia, and when I left there I, too, moved to the NY City area and I can attest that even then, 30 years after McCullers arrived it was a sharp culture shock to go from a little city on the Chatahoochee, a place of urban blight whose primary industry appeared to be prostitution, to the Big City on the Hudson, humming with life and art.
She struggled to adapt and before long she gave up music, married, became Carson McCullers, and wrote The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, a classic of what became known as Southern Gothic. All of her work is about the sadness and loneliness of outsiders and she is one of the - perhaps THE best - Southern novelist before William Faulkner came along, though the other well known Georgia novelist of Southern Gothic, Flannery O'Connor, was a stiff critic of her novels, calling one of them the worst book she had ever read.
McCullers' books are hard to read. I find I either dislike the characters and have trouble empathizing with their troubles - and believe me all of her people have troubles. Or I find myself liking somebody and being brokenhearted because everybody comes to grief. As did McCullers. She had rheumatic fever and became an alcoholic, suffering a series of strokes from an early age, and living the last 20 years or so in a wheelchair.
So if you decide to read The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter be forewarned. It's best to back off from her novels - sort of like watching a horror movie in the middle of the day with all the windows open and lots of people in the house. She is a skilled writer and she will shred your heart if you let her.