When The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was published in 1940, Carson McCullers was instantly recognized as one of the most promising writers of her generation. The novels that followed established her as a master of Southern Gothic. This Library of America volume collects McCullers’s complete novels for the first time in a single-volume edition that reveals the power and breadth of her haunting vision.
“McCullers’s gift,” writes Joyce Carol Oates, “was to evoke, through an accumulation of images and musically repeated phrases, the singularity of experience, not to pass judgment on it.” McCullers effortlessly conveyed the raw anguish of her characters and the weird beauty of their perceptions. Set in small Georgia towns that are at once precisely observed and mythically resonant, McCullers’s novels explore the strange, sometimes grotesque inner lives of characters who are often marginal and misunderstood. Above all, McCullers possessed an unmatched ability to capture the bewilderment and fragile wonder of adolescence.
In The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), one of the most extraordinary debuts in modern American literature, an enigmatic deaf-mute draws out the haunted confessions of an itinerant worker, a young girl, a doctor, and a widowed owner of a small-town café. The disfiguring violence of desire is explored with shocking intensity in two shorter works, Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941) and The Ballad of the Sad Café (1943).
The Member of the Wedding (1946), thought by many to be McCullers’s masterpiece, hauntingly depicts a young girl’s fascination with her brother’s wedding. In 13-year-old Frankie Addams, confused, easily wounded, yet determined to survive, McCullers created her most indelible protagonist. Clock Without Hands (1960), her final novel, was completed against great odds in the midst of tremendous physical suffering. Set against the background of court-ordered school integration, it contains some of McCullers’s most forceful social criticism.
When The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was published in 1940, Carson McCullers was instantly recognized as one of the most promising writers of her generation. The novels that followed established her as a master of Southern Gothic. This Library of America volume collects McCullers’s complete novels for the first time in a single-volume edition that reveals the power and breadth of her haunting vision.
“McCullers’s gift,” writes Joyce Carol Oates, “was to evoke, through an accumulation of images and musically repeated phrases, the singularity of experience, not to pass judgment on it.” McCullers effortlessly conveyed the raw anguish of her characters and the weird beauty of their perceptions. Set in small Georgia towns that are at once precisely observed and mythically resonant, McCullers’s novels explore the strange, sometimes grotesque inner lives of characters who are often marginal and misunderstood. Above all, McCullers possessed an unmatched ability to capture the bewilderment and fragile wonder of adolescence.
In The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), one of the most extraordinary debuts in modern American literature, an enigmatic deaf-mute draws out the haunted confessions of an itinerant worker, a young girl, a doctor, and a widowed owner of a small-town café. The disfiguring violence of desire is explored with shocking intensity in two shorter works, Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941) and The Ballad of the Sad Café (1943).
The Member of the Wedding (1946), thought by many to be McCullers’s masterpiece, hauntingly depicts a young girl’s fascination with her brother’s wedding. In 13-year-old Frankie Addams, confused, easily wounded, yet determined to survive, McCullers created her most indelible protagonist. Clock Without Hands (1960), her final novel, was completed against great odds in the midst of tremendous physical suffering. Set against the background of court-ordered school integration, it contains some of McCullers’s most forceful social criticism.
Carson McCullers: Complete Novels (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Reflections in a Golden Eye, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, The Member of the Wedding, Clock Without Hands) (Library of America)
827Carson McCullers: Complete Novels (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Reflections in a Golden Eye, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, The Member of the Wedding, Clock Without Hands) (Library of America)
827Hardcover
Related collections and offers
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781931082037 |
---|---|
Publisher: | Library of America |
Publication date: | 10/01/2001 |
Series: | Library of America Series , #128 |
Pages: | 827 |
Sales rank: | 78,447 |
Product dimensions: | 5.25(w) x 8.18(h) x 1.45(d) |
Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Customer Reviews
Explore More Items
Have a magical Christmas with Harry Potter, Ron Weasley, Hermione
With over a dozen exclusive Harry Potter collectibles inspired by the
When she was only twenty-three, Carson
From the Modern Library’s new set of beautifully repackaged hardcover classics by William Faulkner—also available
From the Modern Library’s new set of beautifully repackaged hardcover classics by William Faulkner—also available are Snopes, As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, and
From the Modern Library’s new set of beautifully repackaged hardcover classics by William Faulkner—also available
Between 1930 and 1935, William Faulkner came into full possession of the genius and creativity that made him one of America’s finest writers of the twentieth century. The four novels in this
In this volume along with its companion, The Library of America presents all of the most significant and best-loved works of Eudora Welty. Of her own work, she wrote: “What I do in