Carson McCullers

Rheumatic fever in her teens left McCullers with lasting heart damage and, later, a series of strokes that began devastating her body in her twenties, eventually paralyzing one side. She wrote The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter regardless, publishing it at twenty-three to immediate acclaim after moving to New York to study writing rather than the piano she had originally trained for.

Her marriage to Reeves McCullers was volatile and twice-contracted, complicated by the fact that both were drawn to men and women alike; in 1953, after asking her to enter a suicide pact with him, he killed himself alone in a Paris hotel room. She adapted The Member of the Wedding into a hit Broadway play and film despite her declining health.

A massive stroke in 1967 killed her at fifty, after a month in a coma.