From Publishers Weekly
On the heels of Ernest Hemingway's True at First Light and Ralph Ellison's Juneteenth, McCullers's disappointing unfinished autobiography should spark further debate over the ethics of publishing incomplete and flawed posthumous works by heralded authors. While McCullers (1917-1967) was one of the South's most lyrical and insightful novelists, this mishmash of a memoir is certainly one of her least successful ventures. Dews, a University of West Florida English professor, admits that the discursive, "free-associative style of the narrative" may be hard to follow, but he argues that a "chain of associations" provides its guiding organizational principle. Links in this "chain" include McCullers's relationship with her husband, Reeves McCullers, who killed himself in 1953; her maternal grandmother and friends, famous and otherwise; and her views on art. Still, the book remains a perplexing pastiche, and the author herself emerges as self-absorbed and dull. McCullers's discussions of other writers seem little more than exercises in name-dropping and benign gossip (surely, for example, more can be said of Isak Dinesen than that she had a late-life penchant for oysters and champagne). As for her own writing, McCullers too often expresses surprise over how "illumination," or "creative inspiration," would break upon her unexpectedly. But a long outline of McCullers's first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, reveals the intensive planning and discipline that her art required. (Sept.) FYI: In The Flowering Dream: The Historical Saga of Carson McCullers, Nancy B. Rich surveys McCullers's major works and contends that they form "a saga of man's struggle for freedom in the western world." (Chapel Hill Press [100 Eastwood Lake Rd., Chapel Hill, N.C. 27514], $25 136p ISBN 1-880849-14-3; Aug..-, $25 136p ISBN 1-880849-14-3; Aug.) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
In the 50th and final year of her life (1967), McCullers began composing her autobiography, structured around her creative inspirations ("illumination") and the horrors and tragedies in her life ("night glare"). This publication, based on two typescripts housed at the University of Texas, is the draft she dictated to a group of friends, family members, and secretaries from her bed in Nyack, NY, before suffering a final stroke. As intended by McCullers, the appendixes include the outline of her first novel, The Mute, written in 1938 and published as The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), and the first publication of World War II correspondence between McCullers and her husband, Reeves. In this significant contribution to literary scholarship, editor Dews (English, Univ. of West Florida) provides an interesting biographical introduction with comments on the omissions and "exaggerations" in the autobiography and a chronology covering McCullers's life. Readers will find themselves as easily immersed in this work as in McCullers's fiction and will feel sad and rudely shaken when it ends abruptly.AJeris Cassel, Rutgers Univ. Libs., New Brunswick, NJ Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
McCullers' autobiography is somewhat like her life--fragmentary, painful, flitting, sad, and short. Written almost 30 years ago--she died at age 50--the volume was finally allowed to see the light of day by her protective estate. The book consists of three segments. First is a novella-sized fragment, which is more vignettes than narrative, but is marred by repetition and a time line that keeps hopping about. The second segment contains the World War II correspondence between Carson and Reeves, her star-crossed and two-time husband (who himself fell victim to suicide), which above all demonstrates Carson's love but also her insecurities and obsessiveness that must have been factors in her own drinking problems. Finally, the third segment includes an original outline of "The Mute" --which metamorphosed into McCullers' brilliant novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Enough to whet the appetite of literary groupies, but the book leaves one pining for a full-scale biography. Still, an important piece of the puzzle for literary historians. Allen Weakland


From Kirkus Reviews
Unfinished draft of a retrospection, including the inspirations for The Member of the Wedding and The Ballad of the Sad Caf, and the ``nightmare glare'' of her paralyzing strokes. In her last year, 1967, McCullers described her projected autobiography as a means by which both future students and she herself could understand her life: her overnight literary success with The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and her ``holy terror'' career, her crippling illnesses, her unstable husband, Reeves, and, supplying the work's title, her moments of inspiration and periods of depression. After two posthumous biographies, there are no great surprises or revelations here, only the advantage of McCullers's testimony in her own voice. Engaging in what editor Dews calls ``de-mythologizing and re-mythologizing,'' McCullers vividly recounts her family life and childhood in Georgia and her intense friendships with her childhood music teacher, the migre Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach, and her therapist, Dr. Mary Mercer (but omits entirely her fallen-out friend composer David Diamond). Although she had been writing her autobiography for a few years, Dews (English/Univ. of West Florida) suggests, the bulk of this text was dictated because of her deteriorating physical condition, and because of this, it has both a conversational tone and a looser prose style than her earlier personal essays, not to mention unpolished construction. In addition to the extensive outline to ``The Mute,'' The Heart Is a Lonely Hunters first incarnation, McCullers also wanted Illumination and Night Glare bulked up with extracts from letters exchanged between herself and Reeves during WWII before they remarried, letters that chart their relationship's fluctuations as Reeves re-wooed McCullers with grim tales of the European front, then fell silent once McCullers began writing regularly and passionately. Contains glimmerings of promised illuminations, as well as a great deal of humor about herself, but it feels hurried, as though she knew how little time she had left. (21 b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Book Description
"Illumination and Night Glare is an extraordinary document. Dictated in an idiomatic, associative style, it exposes the doubleness of [Carson] McCullers's life. . . . A rich mine of information for anyone interested in McCullers, and American literary life in the 1950s, these memoirs are also a testament to the courage and sheer love of life of their author."—Richard Gray, Times Literary Supplement


From the Publisher
Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography William L. Andrews, General Editor


About the Author
Carlos L. Dews is associate professor and chair of the Department of English and Foreign Languages at the University of West Florida. He is the founding president of the Carson McCullers Society and editor of the Library of America’s Carson McCullers: Complete Novels.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

More than thirty years after it was written, the autobiography of Carson McCullers, Illumination and Night Glare, will be published for the first time. 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, Isak Dinesen, John Huston, Marilyn Monroe), and her intense relationships with the important women in her life.

FROM THE CRITICS

Elizabeth Millard - ForeWord

For anyone who has come to enjoy the graceful and down-to-earth writing of McCullers, this book will be indispensable.

Publishers Weekly

On the heels of Ernest Hemingway's True at First Light and Ralph Ellison's Juneteenth, McCullers's disappointing unfinished autobiography should spark further debate over the ethics of publishing incomplete and flawed posthumous works by heralded authors. While McCullers (1917-1967) was one of the South's most lyrical and insightful novelists, this mishmash of a memoir is certainly one of her least successful ventures. Dews, a University of West Florida English professor, admits that the discursive, "free-associative style of the narrative" may be hard to follow, but he argues that a "chain of associations" provides its guiding organizational principle. Links in this "chain" include McCullers's relationship with her husband, Reeves McCullers, who killed himself in 1953; her maternal grandmother and friends, famous and otherwise; and her views on art. Still, the book remains a perplexing pastiche, and the author herself emerges as self-absorbed and dull. McCullers's discussions of other writers seem little more than exercises in name-dropping and benign gossip (surely, for example, more can be said of Isak Dinesen than that she had a late-life penchant for oysters and champagne). As for her own writing, McCullers too often expresses surprise over how "illumination," or "creative inspiration," would break upon her unexpectedly. But a long outline of McCullers's first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, reveals the intensive planning and discipline that her art required. (Sept.) FYI: In The Flowering Dream: The Historical Saga of Carson McCullers, Nancy B. Rich surveys McCullers's major works and contends that they form "a saga of man's struggle for freedom in the western world." (Chapel Hill Press [100 Eastwood Lake Rd., Chapel Hill, N.C. 27514], $25 136p ISBN 1-880849-14-3; Aug.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

In the 50th and final year of her life (1967), McCullers began composing her autobiography, structured around her creative inspirations ("illumination") and the horrors and tragedies in her life ("night glare"). This publication, based on two typescripts housed at the University of Texas, is the draft she dictated to a group of friends, family members, and secretaries from her bed in Nyack, NY, before suffering a final stroke. As intended by McCullers, the appendixes include the outline of her first novel, The Mute, written in 1938 and published as The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), and the first publication of World War II correspondence between McCullers and her husband, Reeves. In this significant contribution to literary scholarship, editor Dews (English, Univ. of West Florida) provides an interesting biographical introduction with comments on the omissions and "exaggerations" in the autobiography and a chronology covering McCullers's life. Readers will find themselves as easily immersed in this work as in McCullers's fiction and will feel sad and rudely shaken when it ends abruptly.--Jeris Cassel, Rutgers Univ. Libs., New Brunswick, NJ Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Gray - The Times Literary Supplement

...an extraordinary document. Dictated in an idiomatic, associative style, it exposes the doubleness of McCullers's life...A rich mine of information for anyone interested in McCullers, and American literary life in the 1950's, these memoirs are also a testament to the courage and sheer love of life of their author.

Kirkus Reviews

Unfinished draft of a retrospection, including the inspirations for The Member of the Wedding and The Ballad of the Sad Café, and the "nightmare glare" of her paralyzing strokes. In her last year, 1967, McCullers described her projected autobiography as a means by which both future students and she herself could understand her life: her overnight literary success with The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and her "holy terror" career, her crippling illnesses, her unstable husband, Reeves, and, supplying the work's title, her moments of inspiration and periods of depression. After two posthumous biographies, there are no great surprises or revelations here, only the advantage of McCullers's testimony in her own voice. Engaging in what editor Dews calls "de-mythologizing and re-mythologizing," McCullers vividly recounts her family life and childhood in Georgia and her intense friendships with her childhood music teacher, the émigrée Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach, and her therapist, Dr. Mary Mercer (but omits entirely her fallen-out friend composer David Diamond). Although she had been writing her autobiography for a few years, Dews (English/Univ. of West Florida) suggests, the bulk of this text was dictated because of her deteriorating physical condition, and because of this, it has both a conversational tone and a looser prose style than her earlier personal essays, not to mention unpolished construction. In addition to the extensive outline to "The Mute," The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter's first incarnation, McCullers also wanted Illumination and Night Glare bulked up with extracts from letters exchanged between herself and Reeves during WWII before they remarried, lettersthat chart their relationship's fluctuations as Reeves re-wooed McCullers with grim tales of the European front, then fell silent once McCullers began writing regularly and passionately. Contains glimmerings of promised illuminations, as well as a great deal of humor about herself, but it feels hurried, as though she knew how little time she had left. (21 b&w photos, not seen)

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