On March 19, 1946, after seven drafts, nearly six years of artistic distress, and a series of terrible physical and emotional impairments, Carson McCullers (1917–1967) finally published her third novel, The Member of the Wedding. The new novel received wide and largely positive praise, cementing a literary reputation built on the success of her remarkable 1940 debut, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. But eleven days after The Member of the Wedding appeared, Edmund Wilson published a review in the New Yorker that cut McCullers to the quick. Under the headline “Two Books That Leave You Blank: Carson McCullers, Siegfried Sassoon,” Wilson wrote that McCullers was “a writer of undoubted sensibility and talent” but seemed to have “difficulty in adjusting her abilities to a dramatically effective subject.” The new novel was “a formless chronicle” that had no internal structure and did not “build up to anything.” The book “has no element of drama at all,” Wilson wrote. “I hope that I am not being stupid about this book, which has left me feeling rather cheated.”

McCullers, dangerously frail her whole life, learned of the review while she was in residence at the Yaddo writer's colony. She became so unnerved that she descended into a period of acute physical and psychological agony, suffering chronic attacks of dizziness and a terror of fainting in public. But Wilson's review also apparently knocked McCullers's artistic sensibilities askew.