“‘Darling, when I share my loneliness with you I cut it in half.’”

If she is known for nothing else, Carson McCullers is known for being southern. The Georgia-born New York transplant set her fiction almost exclusively in small, stagnant towns in the Deep South. Despite her personal ambivalence toward the region, she needed to write about that South, she admitted, as it was her “own reality”: “People ask me why I don’t go back to the South more often,” she wrote in a 1959 essay. “But the South is a very emotional experience for me … a stirring up of love and antagonism. [Yet] the locale of my books might always be Southern, and the South always my homeland.” McCullers’s fictional South is a timeless, trapped-in-amber place, her settings so tinted with pathos that loneliness itself becomes a region.