Carson McCullers Books In Order

Novels

  1. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940)
  2. Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941)
  3. The Member of the Wedding (1946)
  4. The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1951)
  5. The Square Root of Wonderful (1958)
  6. Clock Without Hands (1961)

Omnibus

  1. Complete Novels (2001)

Collections

  1. The Mortgaged Heart (1971)
  2. Shorter Novels and Stories (1972)
  3. Collected Stories (1987)
  4. The Collected Stories of Carson McCullers (1993)

Chapbooks

  1. Sucker (1992)
  2. Tree, a Rock, a Cloud (1992)

Novellas

  1. The Haunted Boy (1955)

Non fiction

  1. Illumination and Night Glare (1999)

Novels Book Covers

Omnibus Book Covers

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Novellas Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Carson McCullers Books Overview

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

A new trade paperback edition of McCullers’s classic, on the 60th anniversary of its first publication. 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 all 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 hero*ine and loosely based on McCullers, finds solace in her music. Wonderfully attune 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

A new trade paperback edition of McCullers’ second novel, Reflections in a Golden Eye, immortalized by the 1967 film starring Elizabeth Taylor, Marlon Brando, and John Houston. 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.

The Member of the Wedding

Outspoken tomboy Frankie befriends the family’s maid in one of the most beautiful plays ever written about loneliness and love. Tall, awkward, and lonely, Frankie Addams has a vivid imagination but no friends. Even her father calls her a great big long legged 12 year old blunderbuss, and the friendless girl spends most of her time in the kitchen, pouring out her heart to Berenice, the gentle and wise family cook and housekeeper. Frankies jealousy of her brothers impending marriage, and her curious belief that she must accompany him and his bride on their honeymoon in order to belong, drives her to strange measures. She devises a desperate plan, reinventing herself as the seemingly sophisticated F. Jasmine, a gawky beauty in a pink dress who looks closer to 16 than 12. But she’s ill prepared for what follows from this troubling game of make believe. Carson McCullers captures the universal in the particular in this sensitive, nuanced portrayal of one girl’s struggle into adulthood. A L.A. Theatre Works full cast performance featuring: June Angela, John Cothran Jr., Ruby Dee, Daniel Henson, Victor Mack, Jena Malone, Lawrence Pressman, Jacquelyn Riggs and Tegan West.

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe

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

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.’

Complete Novels

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. ‘McCullers’ 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’ 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, an enigmatic deaf mute draws out the haunted confessions of an itinerant worker, a young girl, a black doctor, and the widowed owner of a small town caf . Two shorter works, Reflections in a Golden Eye 1941 and The Ballad of the Sad Caf 1943, use melodramatic scenarios and freakish characters to explore the disfiguring violence of desire. The Member of the Wedding 1946, on which the play and film were based, tells of a young girl’s fascination with her brother’s wedding and is perhaps McCullers’ most moving and accomplished novel. In Clock Without Hands 1960, the story of a terminally ill druggist, McCullers produces some of her most forceful and indignant social criticism. Edited by Carlos Dews.

The Mortgaged Heart

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.

Collected Stories

The stories of one of America’s most distinguished Southern authors, presented in paperback for the first time and including The Member of the Wedding and The Ballad of the Sad Cafe.

The Collected Stories of Carson McCullers

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 Mariner Reissue

Illumination and Night Glare

Illumination and Night Glare is an extraordinary document. Dictated in an idiomatic, associative style, it exposes the doubleness of Carson McCullers’s life…
. A rich mine of information for anyone interested in McCullers, and American literary life in the 1950s, these memoirs are also a testament to the courage and sheer love of life of their author.’ Richard Gray, Times Literary Supplement

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