Virginia Spencer Carr, Literary Biographer, Dies at 82

Virginia Spencer Carr, a literary scholar whose book “The Lonely Hunter” remains the standard biography of Carson McCullers, died on April 10 at her home in Lynn, Mass. She was 82.

The cause was liver disease, her daughter Karen Carr Gale said.

Ms. Carr also wrote respected lives of two other 20th-century American writers, John Dos Passos and Paul Bowles, but McCullers was her first writerly obsession and the subject that defined her career.

Having written her doctoral dissertation on McCullers’s work, Ms. Carr began “The Lonely Hunter” in the late 1960s after landing a job as an English professor at Columbus College (now Columbus State University) in Columbus, Ga., McCullers’s hometown....