In one volume, the complete short fiction of the author of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, including her two most renowned novellas.Carson McCullers—novelist, dramatist, poet—was at the peak of her powers as a writer of short fiction. Here are nineteen stories that explore her signature themes including loneliness in marriage and the tragicomedy of life in the South. Included in this volume are "The Member of the Wedding" and "The Ballad of the Sad Café," no...

A Southern woman is undone by love and gossip in the classic novella, one of seven stories in this "brilliant . . . panorama of remarkable talent" ( The New York Times).One of the most celebrated and enduringly popular works in Southern literature, this collection assembles Carson McCullers's best stories, including her beloved novella "The Ballad of the Sad Café." A haunting tale of love and violence in a small Southern town, the novella introduces reader...

An "impeccable" novel about race relations and responsibility set in the civil-rights-era South, by the author of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter ( The Atlantic Monthly).In a small Georgia town, pharmacist J. S. Malone, diagnosed with leukemia, is given a mere year to live—and a lifetime's worth of regret over years and opportunities wasted. Meanwhile, Judge Clane, still reeling from the suicide of his son, looks for meaning in the past and judgment i...

An imaginative twelve-year-old Georgia tomboy is jealous of her brother's upcoming wedding in this classic Southern novel.Carson McCullers's classic The Member of the Wedding charmed generations of readers and became an award-winning play and a major motion picture. It tells the story of the inimitable twelve-year-old Frankie, who is utterly, hopelessly bored with life until she hears about her older brother's upcoming marriage. Bolstered by lively conversa...

With delicacy of perception and memory, humour and pathos, Carson McCullers spreads before us the three phases of a weekend crisis in the life of a motherless twelve-year-old girl. Within the span of a few hours, the irresistible, hoydenish Frankie passionately plays out her fantasies at her elder brother's wedding. Through a perilous skylight we look into the mind of a child torn between her yearning to belong and the urge to run away

The classic tale of marriage, infidelity, and homosexual yearning on a Southern army base by the acclaimed author of The Ballad of the Sad Café.Georgia, 1930s. Army bases are notoriously boring places during peacetime, but the quiet life of Captain Penderton is thrown into turmoil by the arrival of dashing ladies' man Major Langdon. Penderton's marriage has always been tempestuous, but when his wife Leonora begins an affair with Langdon, Penderton...

The beloved Southern Gothic classic that turned Carson McCullers into an overnight literary sensation and one of the Modern Library's top 20 novels of the 20th century."A remarkable book…From the opening page, brilliant in its establishment of mood, character, and suspense, the book takes hold of the reader."—The New York TimesIn a Depression-era Georgia Mill town, an enigmatic deaf mute man, John Singer, draws out the haunted conf...

McCullers' second novel, REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE, is set on a Southern army base in the 1930s, REFLECTIONS tells the story of Captain Penderton, a bisexual whose life is upset by the arrival of Major Langdon, a charming womanizer who has an affair with Penderton's tempestuous and flirtatious wife, Leonora.

"Essential reading for any serious beginning writer . . . illuminating." — San Francisco ChronicleCarson McCullers is renowned for her Southern Gothic fiction and for such modern classics as The Member of the Wedding. This collection includes an assortment of her earliest work, written mostly before she was nineteen.Included are stories, essays, articles, poems, and writing about writing—including the working outline of "The Mute," which wo...

A landmark gathering of McCullers’ shorter works, including all her published stories, plays, essays, poems, and an unfinished autobiographyCelebrated worldwide for her masterly novels, Carson McCullers was equally accomplished, and equally moving, when writing in shorter forms. This Library of America volume brings together for the first time her twenty extraordinary stories, along with plays, essays, memoirs, and poems. Here are the indelible tales “Madame Zilens...

Celebrated worldwide for her masterly novels, Carson McCullers was equally accomplished, and equally moving, when writing in other forms. The play The Member of the Wedding (1950), adapted from her 1946 novel at the urging of her close friend Tennessee Williams is, like Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, a great American poem for the stage. At its center is tomboy Frankie Addams, a motherless adolescent neglected by her father and utterly bored with life in small-town Georgia un...

The first and only definitive collection of the letters of a beloved voice in American literature, revealing her fervor as a creator immersed in a life of art and beauty, her adoration of friends and partners, and her lifelong pursuit of true love and belonging.Carson McCullers was a true literary phenomenon. One of the most influential and esteemed writers of the twentieth century, she penned the iconic The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter at just twenty-three an...