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.
LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization
founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by
publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most
significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than
300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in
length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are
printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
