Throughout her life, the novelist Carson McCullers struck observers as preternaturally young. The biographer Leon Edel, who met her when she was thirty-seven, remarked on her “childish wonder.” The French novelist Françoise Sagan wrote that she had the “laugh of a child forever lost.” Like a child, she loved sweets, Christmas, and receiving presents on her birthday. Though she was tall—a “slender wand of a girl,” in the words of her protégé turned rival, Truman Capote—she was often described as “little”: “an odd little 22-year-old,” a “little star.”
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