CARSON McCULLERS, American author was born (d. 1967); When she was twenty-three, the gifted novelist and playwright of “the hungry search of people for an escape from individual loneliness, for self-expression and for identification with what each most idealizes in human living.”

Her own hungry search led to marriage to the homosexual Reeves McCullers, who eventually killed himself; a love affair with composer David Diamond, who was simultaneously sleeping with her husband; to infatuations with Greta Garbo, Erica Mann, and other women; and to such works as The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, The Member of the Wedding, and Reflections in a Golden Eye. Because of her sad life, or in spite of it, she remains compulsively readable.