She was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia. Her dream was to become a concert pianist, though she’d been writing since she was 16, and the influence of music was evident throughout her work. At 20, she married Reeves McCullers, a fellow southerner, ex-soldier and aspiring writer. They had a fraught, tumultuous marriage lasting 12 years and ending with his suicide in 1953. Her first novel, THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER, was published in 1940 when she was 23. Overnight, Carson McCullers became the most widely talked about writer of the time. With unprecedented access to the cache of materials that has surfaced in the past decade, Mary Dearborn gives us the first full picture of this brilliant, complex artist who was decades ahead of her time, a writer who understood --- and captured --- the heart and longing of the outcast.

The first full biography of Ernest Hemingway in more than 15 years is the first to draw on a wide array of never-before-used material, resulting in the most nuanced portrait to date of this complex, enigmatic artist. Considered in his time the greatest living American writer, Hemingway was a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize whose personal demons undid him in the end, and whose novels and stories have influenced the writing of fiction for generations after his death. Mary V. Dearborn’s revelatory investigation of his life and work substantially deepens our understanding of the artist and the man.