Columbus State University has completed a major preservation and rehabilitation of Carson McCullers’ former home in Nyack, New York—an 1880s Victorian overlooking the Hudson River—earning a Rehabilitation Award from the Historical Society of Rockland County for its restored façade and front walkway.
Together with McCullers’ childhood home in Columbus, Georgia, the Nyack residence now forms a bistate “literary bridge” between the Hudson and the Chattahoochee, serving as the centerpiece of Columbus State’s Carson McCullers Center for Writers & Musicians and positioning the university as a leading hub for research and archives on McCullers.
The Nyack house is being transformed into a study-away and creative residency space, hosting Columbus State students for spring break and summer programs, supporting internships in nearby Manhattan, and welcoming writers, musicians, filmmakers and scholars for short-term fellowships in the home where McCullers wrote and entertained cultural figures like Tennessee Williams, Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller.
Today, thanks to Columbus State University’s dedicated efforts, this historic residence is preserved as a monument to one of America’s most prominent Southern Gothic voices.
McCullers, born Lula Carson Smith, was a Columbus native whose work—including The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and The Member of the Wedding—captured the complexities of the human condition with a haunting, lyrical precision. Since 2003, Columbus State has operated the Carson McCullers Center for Writers & Musicians in the author’s childhood home on Stark Avenue, near its RiverPark Campus, where McCullers lived from the age of 10 until she graduated from Columbus High School. When the university secured McCullers’ adult home in New York in 2013, it created a geographical bridge between her Southern roots and the Northern landscape where she solidified her literary fame…