Complete Novels: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter/Reflections in a Golden Eye/The Ballad of the Sad Cafe/The Member of the Wedding/The Clock Without Hands (Library of America)

About this book

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 McCullerss complete novels for the first time in a single-volume edition that reveals the power and breadth of her haunting vision. McCullerss 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 McCullerss 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 caf. 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 Caf (1943). The Member of the Wedding (1946) thought by many to be McCullerss masterpiece hauntingly depicts a young girls fascination with her brothers 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 McCullerss most forceful social criticism. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nations literary heritage by publishing and keeping permanently in print Americas 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.