Maggie Doherty reviews “Carson McCullers: A Life,” Mary Dearborn's new biography of the author of “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter" in The New Yorker. An excerpt is included below: 

Throughout her life, the novelist Carson McCullers struck observers as preternaturally young. The biographer Leon Edel, who met her when she was thirty-seven, remarked on her “childish wonder.” The French novelist Françoise Sagan wrote that she had the “laugh of a child forever lost.” Like a child, she loved sweets, Christmas, and receiving presents on her birthday. Though she was...

See first look photos of Becoming A Man at American Repertory Theater, a world premiere play about one man's gender transition amid a pivotal political moment in America. From acclaimed memoirist P. Carl and Tony Award-winning director Diane Paulus, Becoming a Man is a story about the courage-and the community-we need to become ourselves.

For fifty years, Carl lived as a girl and then a queer woman, building a career and a loving marriage while waiting to realize himself in full. When he decides to affirm his gender, his transition puts everything-family,...

Harvard University recently announced the creation of the Black Film Project, which is designed to support filmmakers of any race who illuminate Black history and culture through nonfiction films.

The project, founded by Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, will be housed at the HutchinsCenter in partnership with Harvard’s Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies.

“I conceived of the Black Film Project as a way of contributing to the growing momentum of filmmaking about the Black experience, and as a...