Brain Snacks: Tasty Tidbits of Knowledge
In the 1955 feature film Picnic a schoolteacher deems The Ballad of the Sad Café too controversial to make worthwhile reading for one high school girl (Source).
McCullers wrote "Wunderkind" in 1936, at nineteen. She herself attended piano lessons from the age of five to the age of seventeen, practicing five hours a day. She was destined to head to Julliard after high school, but a lack of money, or her always not-great health, or some combination of the two, prevented it (Source).
Carson McCullers was no "Employee of the Month." In fact she was fired from every non-writing job she ever had (Source).
It's not only her papers that are held in the archives at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin. It's also many of her personal affects, including "a handkerchief printed with a recipe for Irish Coffee; a torn straw hat; a pair of cream wool socks, worn on the soles." None of these would be out of place in any of her fiction, would it? (Source)
Famous Southern playwright Tennessee Williams counted McCullers as one of his best writer friends. The two met after he wrote her a fan letter and invited her to his home in Nantucket. "Such an enchanting person!" Williams said of his dear pal (Source).
Even though there are no prominent kid characters in Ballad, they do crop up in the stories, and it's for a reason: "There is so much truth in children and so little self-consciousness," McCullers once said (Source).