Tras el éxito obtenido con El corazón es un cazador solitario a la temprana edad de veintitrés años, Carson McCullers escandalizó a la opinión pública americana con Reflejos en un ojo dorado, abordando, en esta su segunda novela, temas como la homosexualidad, la infidelidad o la desolación en el contexto de una intachable institución del ejército americano durante la década de los treinta. Nadie ha dudado jamás, sin embargo, de que es una novela perfecta escrita en estado de gracia. En el ambiente enclaustrado de una base militar, un islote aparte en el mundo, un precipitado de tensiones internas desemboca en una muerte violenta. La prosa rabiosamente lúcida que recorre Reflejos en un ojo dorado, convierte esta novela brutal en mucho más que la historia de un crimen: es un microcosmos, el espejo de los fantasmas interiores que pueblan la mente de los personajes de Carson McCullers, y una de las más acabadas muestras del arte de esta escritora excepcional, que inspiró una ya clásica adaptación cinematográfica dirigida por John Huston, con Marlon Brando y Elizabeth Taylor en los papeles principales. Un título esencial de la narrativa norteamericana contemporánea.
About the Author, Carson McCullers
Carson McCullers
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter introduced Carson McCullers as both a major literary talent and as a bestselling author. A troubled soul who could translate heartbreak and despair into beautiful prose, McCullers’s novels and stories established her as one of the great writers of the American South.
Biography
Carson McCullers, novelist, short story writer, and playwright, was born Lula Carson Smith on February 19, 1917, in Columbus, Georgia, the daughter of Lamar Smith, a jewelry storeowner, and Vera Marguerite Waters. Best known for her novels The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, The Ballad of the Sad Café, Reflections in a Golden Eye, and The Member of the Wedding, McCullers also won awards for her adaptation of The Member of the Wedding for the Broadway stage. After completing high school, Carson studied for two years in New York before marrying James Reeves McCullers and moving to New York permanently upon the publication of her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, in 1940 when McCullers was only 23. Heralded as a wunderkind by critics, McCullers' most significant was published between 1943 and 1950. Plagued by a series of strokes attributed to a mis-diagnosed and untreated case of childhood rheumatic fever, McCullers died at age fifty in 1967. With a collection of work including five novels, two plays, twenty short stories, over two dozen nonfiction pieces, a book of children's verses, a small number of poems, and an unfinished autobiography, McCullers is considered among the most significant American writers of the twentieth-century.
Author biography courtesy of The Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians at Columbus State University, Columbus, GA.
