The Mortgaged Heart: Selected Writings

by Carson McCullers, Margarita G. Smith (Editor), Joyce Carol Oates (Introduction)

Overview

An absorbing look at the early beginnings of one of America’s finest writers, The Mortgaged Heart is an important collection of Carson McCullers’s work, including stories, essays, articles, poems, and her writing on writing. These pieces, written mostly before McCullers was nineteen, provide invaluable insight into her life and her gifts and growth as a writer. The collection also contains the working outline of "The Mute,” which became her best-selling novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. As new generations of readers continue to discover her work, Carson McCullers’s celebrated place in American letters survives more surely than ever. Edited by McCullers’s sister and with a new introduction by Joyce Carol Oates, The Mortgaged Heart will be an inspiration to writers young and old.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780547346830
Publisher:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publication date:	04/05/2005
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Carson McCullers (1917-1967) was the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, The Member of the Wedding, Reflections in a Golden Eye, and Clock Without Hands. Born in Columbus, Georgia, on February 19, 1917, she became a promising pianist and enrolled in the Juilliard School of Music in New York when she was seventeen, but lacking money for tuition, she never attended classes. Instead she studied writing at Columbia University, which ultimately led to The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, the novel that made her an overnight literary sensation. On September 29, 1967, at age fifty, she died in Nyack, New York, where she is buried.

Date of Birth:

February 19, 1917

Date of Death:

November 29, 1967

Place of Birth:

Columbus, Georgia

Place of Death:

Nyack, New York

Education:

Columbia University and New York University, 1935

Table of Contents

	Introduction to the Mariner edition
	Introduction
	Short stories
	Sucker	9
	Court in the west eighties	20
	Poldi	31
	Breath from the sky	39
	The orphanage	49
	Instant of the hour after	54
	Like that	64
	Wunderkind	74
	The aliens	88
	Untitled piece	98
	Author's outline of "The mute" (The heart is a lonely hunter)	124
	Correspondence	153
	Art and Mr. Mahoney	160
	The haunted boy	164
	Who has seen the wind?	178
	Essays and articles
	Look homeward, Americans	209
	Night watch over freedom	214
	Brooklyn is my neighbourhood	216
	We carried our banners - we were pacifists, too	221
	Our heads are bowed	227
	Home for Christmas	233
	The discovery of Christmas	238
	A hospital Christmas Eve	245
	How I began to write	249
	The Russian realists and southern literature	252
	Loneliness ... an American malady	259
	The vision shared	262
	Isak Dinesen : Winter's tales (book review)	266
	Isak Dinesen : in praise of radiance	269
	The flowering dream : notes on writing	274
	Poetry
	The mortgaged heart	286
	When we are lost	287
	The dual angel	288
	Stone is not stone	293
	Saraband	294