When her first novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, was published to acclaim in 1940, McCullers, at only twenty-three, seemed set for a lifetime of literary glory. In fact, some believe that, in a life beset by illness, she never realized her full potential. Still, her corpus, though short, is impressive and spans a variety of genres from novel and short story to plays, the odd magazine article, and even some poetry. A number of her novels have also been brought to film.

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Born in Columbus, Georgia, McCullers is characterized as one of the chief exponents of the so-called Southern gothic. Accordingly, she is renowned for her depiction of lonely, festering townships and her careful cataloging of the sexual and social alienation of their desolate occupants. Certainly her novels reflect both the bleakness and the strange beauty of the genre. Momentarily, love triumphs.

Thus, the affecting, yet strangely unaccountable, love of the deaf mute Singer for his friend Antonapoulos in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter serves as a focus and a catalyst for the other relations depicted in the novel. However, as befits the type, Singer's subsequent suicide projects the book onto another level of despair, its message of hope rendered ambiguous if not totally muted.

The other novels seem similarly hard to place and range from the tense antebellum tragedy of Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941) to the carnival hysteria of The Ballad of the Sad Café (1943).

Although never obviously either lesbian or gay, however, characters like the independent Miss Amelia, the belligerent tomboys Mick and Frankie, the sensitive Biff Brannon, and the tortured Captain Penderton offer uncomfortable resistance to the social ideal of neat heterosexuality. It is in this tendency to disrupt obvious categorization that McCullers's corpus holds an interest.

McCullers' own life is as ambiguous as her novels.

Married twice to the same man, Reeves McCullers, both declared their attraction for their own sex and in later life often pursued each other's amours. This complicated ménage ended with Reeves's suicide in 1953.

Carson's great love alongside Reeves was for fellow writer Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach. This relation was unfortunately cut short by the latter's unexpected death in 1942. Since McCullers was always delightfully indiscreet about her love interests, there are numerous stories linking her romantically with Gypsy Rose Lee, Greta Garbo, and (the extremely reluctant) Katharine Anne Porter, before whose door she allegedly mounted guard.

Inevitably, much of this information is confined to rumor and speculation since Virginia Spencer Carr's biography The Lonely Hunter, though otherwise excellent, gives only the most discreet coverage to affairs of the flesh.

The American dramatist Edward Albee, whose career flourished in the 1960s and then waned as a result of homophobia, wrote plays with gay subtexts in which loving is the ultimate act of violence and violence is the most effective expression of love.

Writer, actress, and intellectual refugee from the Third Reich, Erika Mann was one of the twentieth century's most intriguing nonconformists, noted especially for her anti-fascist cabaret satire.

Swiss writer and photojournalist Annemarie Schwarzenbach documented social conditions from Afghanistan to Alabama; her fiction reflected the tormented attachments and recurring loneliness that plagued her short lifetime.

Conflicted over his own sexuality, Tennessee Williams wrote directly about homosexuality only in his short stories, his poetry, and his late plays.