McCullers was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia, in 1917 to Lamar Smith, a jeweller, and Marguerite Waters. She was named after her maternal grandmother, Lula Carson Waters. She had a younger … See more

Maxim Lieber was McCullers's literary agent in 1938 and intermittently thereafter. In 1940, at the age of 23, writing in the Southern Gothic or perhaps Southern realist traditions, McCullers completed her first novel, The … See more