The Lonely Hunter is widely accepted as the standard biography of Carson McCullers. Author of such works of American fiction as Reflections in a Golden Eye and The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, Carson McCullers was the enfant terrible of the literary world of the 1940s and 1950s. Gifted but tormented, vulnerable but exploitative, McCullers led a life that had all the elements of a tragic novel. From McCullers' birth in Columbus, Georgia in 1917 to her death in upstate New York in 1967, this book covers every significant event in and aspect of, the writer's life: her rise as a young literary sensation; her emotional, artistic and sexual eccentricities and entanglements; her debilitating illnesses; her travels in America and Europe; and the provenance of her works from their earliest drafts through their book, stage and film versions.