In Memoriam: Virginia Spencer Carr

Professor Emeritus of English Virginia Spencer Carr

Virginia Spencer Carr, biographer of Carson McCullers, John Dos Passos and Paul Bowles, died April 10 at her home in Lynn, Mass., after a brief illness. She was 82 years old. 

“The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers,” first published by Doubleday in 1975, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and established Carr as a major literary biographer. The biography’s title is a clever allusion to McCullers’s first novel, “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter” (1940), generally regarded as one of the most important American novels of the 20th century.

Carr researched and wrote her biographies of McCullers, John Dos Passos (“Dos Passos: A Life,” Doubleday, 1984) and Paul Bowles (“Paul Bowles: A Life,” Scribner, 2004) while pursuing her academic career as a college professor and university administrator. 

Carr was a professor of English, department chair and avid fundraiser for GSU. At the time of her retirement in 2003, having been employed at the university since 1985, she held the John B. and Elena Diaz-Verson Amos Distinguished Chair in English Letters. 

In addition to the biographies of McCullers, Dos Passos, and Bowles, she was the editor of a book devoted to the fiction of Katherine Anne Porter (“Flowering Judas: Katherine Anne Porter,” Rutgers University Press, 1993) and wrote the introduction to “The Collected Stories of Carson McCullers” (Houghton Mifflin, 1987). She was also the author of “Understanding Carson McCullers” (University of South Carolina Press, 1990), a highly condensed overview of McCullers’s life and work. Over the course of her career as an academic and biographer, she wrote many scholarly articles and lectured widely.

Survivors include her partner, Mary E. Robbins, whom Ms. Carr married in 2006; three daughters, Karen Carr Gale of Wichita, Kan., Catherine Carr Lee of South Hadley, Mass., and Kimberly Carr Morris of Dade City, Fla; and seven grandchildren.