All the Love You Can Use: The Letters of Carson McCullers

The first and only definitive collection of the letters of a beloved voice in American literature, revealing her fervor as a creator immersed in a life of art and beauty, her adoration of friends and partners, and her lifelong pursuit of true love and belonging.

Carson McCullers was a true literary phenomenon. One of the most influential and esteemed writers of the twentieth century, she penned the iconic The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter at just twenty-three and went on to have a remarkable career that inspired adaptations and tributes from writers such as Edward Albee, Charles Bukowski, Isak Dinesen, Edith Sitwell, and Tennessee Williams. Known for its melancholy tone and distinctly Southern sensibility, her work touched many, giving voice to the mistreated, the oppressed, and all those struggling to be accepted. And though her fiction explored themes of isolation and exile, McCullers herself enjoyed the support of a robust community of friends and fellow artists and experienced many passionate attachments over the course of her life.

The letters collected here cover the entirety of McCullers’s correspondence from 1935 until her death in 1967. They include letters to over two hundred recipients and chronicle the celebrations and tragedies of her lifetime—from her tumultuous marriage, divorce, and re-marriage with Reeves McCullers; to her all-consuming passions for women, including the Swiss artist Annemarie Schwarzenbach and the writer Marty Mann, illuminated in recently discovered correspondence; and to her complicated, decades-long relationship with the composer David Diamond, to whom the largest number of her letters were written. Also elucidated are her close collaborations with artists including Newton Arvin, Kay Boyle, Bessie Breuer, Klaus Mann, and Muriel Rukeyser; Oliver Evans, her biographer; and John Huston, the director of the film adaptation of Reflections in a Golden Eye and to whom her final known letter was sent.

Intimate, earnest, and as heartbreaking as it is uplifting, this collection is a product of remarkable scholarship and dedication. The result is the most comprehensive portrait of McCullers ever published, a true window into the emotional landscape behind her work and the deeply held loves she had throughout her brief but exceptional life.

“Too readily classified, or dismissed, as a Southern Gothicist, Carson McCullers is one of the most radical writers of the American mid-twentieth century. . . . McCullers is the poet of freakiness—the feeling of being in a body not your own, neither female nor male, but some indefinable, teasing mixture of both that is most keenly felt in adolescence.” - Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of Books

“Like all writers of original genius, Miss McCullers convinces us that we have missed something which was plainly to be seen in the real world . . . She is a master of peculiar perception and an in com - parable storyteller . . . a writer of the highest class.” - V. S. Pritchett

“Carson McCullers never rewrote the front pages to brand them novels. Although she was concerned about the barbarism of racism in her native South, her short stories and novels were allegorical, yet crystalline. She dignified the individual, especially life’s losers . . . She reflected the lonely heart with a golden hand.” - New York Times

“I have found in her works such intensity and nobility of spirit as we have not had in our prose writing since Herman Melville.” - Tennessee Williams