Illumination and Night Glare

MORE THAN THIRTY YEARS AFTER IT WAS written, the autobiography of Carson McCullers, Illumination and Night Glare, will be published for the first time. McCullers -- one of the most gifted writers of her generation, author of The Member of the Wedding, Reflections in a Golden Eye, and "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe" -- died of a stroke at the age of fifty before finishing this, her last manuscript. Editor Carlos L. Dews has faithfully brought her story back to life, complete with never-before-published letters between McCullers and her husband Reeves, and an outline of her most famous novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.Looking back over her life from a precocious childhood in Georgia to her painful decline after a series of crippling strokes, McCullers offers poignant and unabashed remembrances of her early writing success, her family attachments, a troubled marriage, friendships with literary and film luminaries (Gypsy Rose Lee, Richard Wright, lsak Dinesen, John Huston, Marilyn Monroe), and her intense relationships with the important women in her life.When she was interviewed by Rex Reed in the Plaza Hotel on her final birthday, McCullers revealed her reason for writing an autobiography: "I think it is important for future generations of students to know why I did certain things, but it is also important for myself. I became an established literary figure overnight, and I was much too young to understand what happened to me or the responsibility it entailed. I was a bit of a holy terror. That, combined with all my illnesses, nearly destroyed me. Perhaps if I trace and preserve for other generations the effect this success had on me it will prepare future artists to accept itbetter".