Works by
Carson McCullers
(Writer)
[February 19, 1917 – September 29, 1967]

Novels

• The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940) -- 2004 Oprah Book Club selection
  With the publication of her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers, all of twenty-three, became a literary sensation. With its profound sense of moral isolation and its compassionate glimpses into its characters' inner lives, the novel is considered McCullers' finest work, an enduring masterpiece first published by Houghton Mifflin in 1940.
  
  At its center is the deaf-mute John Singer, who becomes the confidant for various types of misfits in a Georgia mill town during the 1930s. Each one yearns for escape from small town life. When Singer's mute companion goes insane, Singer moves into the Kelly house, where Mick Kelly, the book's heroine (and loosely based on McCullers), finds solace in her music.
  
  Wonderfully attuned to the spiritual isolation that underlies the human condition, and with a deft sense for racial tensions in the South, McCullers spins a haunting, unforgettable story that gives voice to the rejected, the forgotten, and the mistreated -- and, through Mick Kelly, gives voice to the quiet, intensely personal search for beauty.
  
  Richard Wright praised Carson McCullers for her ability "to rise above the pressures of her environment and embrace white and black humanity in one sweep of apprehension and tenderness." She writes "with a sweep and certainty that are overwhelming," said the New York Times. McCullers became an overnight literary sensation, but her novel has endured, just as timely and powerful today as when it was first published.
  
  The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is Carson McCullers at her most compassionate, endearing best.

• Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941)
  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. Upon the novel's publication in 1941, reviewers were unsure of what to make of its relatively scandalous subject matter. But a critic for Time Magazine wrote, "In almost any hands, such material would yield a rank fruitcake of mere arty melodrama. But Carson McCullers tells her tale with simplicity, insight, and a rare gift of phrase." Written during a time when McCullers's own marriage to Reeves was on the brink of collapse, her second novel deals with her trademark themes of alienation and unfulfilled loves.
  Movie: McCullers' second novel, Reflections in a Golden Eye, immortalized by the 1967 film starring Elizabeth Taylor, Marlon Brando, and John Houston.

• The Member of the Wedding (1946)
  Here is the story of the inimitable twelve-year-old Frankie, who is utterly, hopelessly bored with life until she hears about her older brother's wedding. Bolstered by lively conversations with her house servant, Berenice, and her six-year-old male cousin not to mention her own unbridled imagination Frankie takes on an overly active role in the wedding, hoping even to go, uninvited, on the honeymoon, so deep is her desire to be the member of something larger, more accepting than herself.
  Movie:

• Clock Without Hands (1961)
  Set in Georgia on the eve of court-ordered integration, Clock Without Hands contains McCullers's most poignant statement on race, class, and justice. A small-town druggist dying of leukemia calls himself and his community to account in this tale of change and changelessness, of death and the death-in-life that is hate. It is a tale, as McCullers herself wrote, of "response and responsibility--of man toward his own livingness."

• The Jockey (1941)
  See The Ballad of the Sad Cafe -- And Other Stories

• The Ballad of the Sad Cafe -- And Other Stories (1967)
  A Domestic Dilemma; A Tree - a Rock - a Cloud; Madame Zilensky and the King of Finland; The Jockey; The Sojourner; and Wunderkind

• Collected Stories of Carson McCullers (1987)
  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: wounded adolescence, loneliness in marriage, and the tragicomedy of life in the South. Here too are "The Member of the Wedding" and "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe," novellas that Tennessee Williams judged to be "assuredly among the masterpieces of our language."

• A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud (1989)
  A transient stops at an all-night cafe and explains to the owner and a paperboy how the science of love helped him to recover after his wife left him. Young Adults.

• The Ballad of the Sad Cafe: and Other Stories (1951)
  A classic work that has charmed generations of readers, this collection assembles Carson McCullers's best stories, including her beloved novella "The Ballad of the Sad Caf." A haunting tale of a human triangle that culminates in an astonishing brawl, the novella introduces readers to Miss Amelia, a formidable southern woman whose caf serves as the town's gathering place. Among other fine works, the collection also includes "Wunderkind," McCullers's first published story written when she was only seventeen about a musical prodigy who suddenly realizes she will not go on to become a great pianist. Newly reset and available for the first time in a handsome trade paperback edition, The Ballad of the Sad Caf is a brilliant study of love and longing from one of the South's finest writers.

• Clock Without Hands (1961)

• The Mortgaged Heart (1972) Margarita G. Smith (Carson McCuller's sister)
  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.

See also:

• Ballad of Carson McCullers: A Biography (1966) by Oliver Evans

• Famous American Plays of the 1940s (1972), Henry Hewes, Ed.
  All My Sons, Home of the Brave, Lost in the Stars, Member of the Wedding, Skin of Our Teeth

• Carson McCullers and the South (1974) by Delma Eugene Presley

• The American Woman in Crisis: A Study of Three Novels (1974) by Sandra McDonald

• The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers (1975, 2003) by Virginia Spencer Carr

• Katherine Anne Porter and Carson McCullers: A Reference Guide (1976) by Robert F Kiernan
  See also Katherine Anne Porter.

• The Achievement of Carson McCullers (1978) by Everett Edwards

• Carson McCullers (1980) by Margaret B. McDowell

• Sacred Groves and Ravaged Gardens: The Fiction of Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O'Connor (1985) by Louise Westling
  See also Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O'Connor.

• Carson McCullers (1986) by Harold Bloom

• The Heart is A Lonely Hunter: Curriculum Unit (1990) by Myrna Jean Warren

• Understanding Carson Mccullers (1990) by Virginia Spencer Carr

• Wunderkind: The Reputation of Carson McCullers 1940-1990 (1995) by Judith Giblin James

• Carson McCullers (1997) by Janine Steinbauer

• Carson McCullers: A Life (2001) by Josyane Savigneau with Joan E. Howard, Translator

• The Fiction of Carson McCullers; Quest for Love (2003) by Pratibha Nagpal

• February House: The Story of W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee, Under One Roof In Wartime America (2005) by Sherill Tippins -- Finalist Lambda Literary Award for Biography

• Freaks In Late Modernist American Culture: Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Tod Browning, And Carson Mccullers (2005) by Nancy Bombaci
  Freaks in Late Modernist American Culture explores the emergence of what Nancy Bombaci terms "late modernist freakish aesthetics"-a creative fusion of "high" and "low" themes and forms in relation to distorted bodies. Literary and cinematic texts about "freaks" by Carson McCullers, Djuna Barnes, Nathanael West, and Tod Browning and subvert and reinvent modern progress narratives in order to challenge high modernist literary and social ideologies. These works are marked by an acceptance of the disteleology, anarchy, and degeneration that racist discourses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries associated with racial and ethnic outsiders, particularly Jews. In a period of American culture beset with increasing pressures for social and political conformity and with the threat of fascism from Europe, these late modernist narratives about "freaks" defy oppressive norms and values as they search for an anarchic and transformational creativity.

• Reflections in a Critical Eye: Essays on Carson McCullers (2007) by Whitt Jan

• Tennessee Williams and His Contemporaries (2007) by Robert Bray
  Tennessee Williams and His Contemporaries compiles eight transcribed panels that were featured at The Tennessee Williams Scholars Conference, an annual event held each March in conjunction with the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival. This study, the first of its kind, explores issues involving Williams s drama, fiction, poetry, and films in a discursive format designed to probe and debate the legacy of America s famous playwright. Virtually all aspects of Williams s long career are covered in this volume, including the early and late plays, his unpublished work, his use of the grotesque, and his relationships with three of his contemporaries: Carson McCullers, Lillian Hellman, and William Inge. In addition, Williams scholars who teach his work discuss the most effective strategies for bringing his material into the classroom. The unique design of this volume offers a broad understanding of his material for students previously unacquainted with Tennessee Williams as well as fresh perspectives from recognized experts in the field that will satisfy those who are already familiar with his life and work.