Carson McCullers: Complete Novels (Loa #128): The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter / Reflections in a Golden Eye / The Ballad of the Sad Caf? / The Member of

by Carson McCullers and Carlos L. Dews

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1931082030
• ISBN13: 9781931082037
• Release Date: October 2001
• Publisher: Library of America
• Length: 827 Pages
• Weight: 1.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.6" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

delightful

I could read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter over and over - such an awesome story. As a McCullers fan, I enjoyed reading her other works.

a must-read now

THIS BOOK IS FULL OF GREAT STORIES. " THE MEMBER OF THE WEDDING" IS MY FAVORITE! I THINK IT TOOK C. M. 7 YEARS TO WRITE THE PLAY AND STORY! ANYONE INTERESTED IN WRITING OR GREAT WRITERS SHOULD BUY THIS BOOK. IT'S A MUST-RED NOW BOOK!!!!!

The American Jane Austen?

I have read many novels by many writers, both American and foreign, but it's been a good long while since I've read something so penetrating and perceptive as Carson McCuller's first and last novels. The characters in the books, their lives and personalities, are so well thought-out and delineated that you have to wonder how a woman of 23 could put something like this together. Anyway, below is a synopsis of each story in this volume.The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is the longest of Carson McCullers' novels, and the first. She wrote it in the late `30s, and published it in 1940, when she was 23. It's an incredible first novel, and amazingly prescient and wise for someone of her age, era, and upbringing. The story revolves around a deaf mute, John Singer, who works engraving silverware in a small city in the South somewhere. He has only one friend in the world, another deaf mute who works for his cousin, making candy. As the story begins the candymaker (named Antanopolous) is committed to an asylum, and Singer moves from the home they shared, and slowly begins to acquire a circle of other friends. Principle in this circle are four people: Mick, the daughter of his landlords at the rooming house he lives in; Biff, who runs the diner where he takes his meals; Blount, another denizen of the diner, who wishes to unionize the local mill-workers; and Dr.Copeland, a black man who rages against the injustice of white society towards him and his race. The heart of the story is a character study of these five people, with alternating chapters following the one and then the other. Each is intelligent, in his or her own way, and each has special insights into the world around them. How these characters interact, and the relationships between them and the rest of the world, make the heart of the story and most of the book.Reflections in a Golden Eye is a shorter story, one of McCullers' novels that is really more of a novella. The plot revolves around a love triangle that develops between two officers on an Army base, and the wife of one of them. There's also a strange, solitary, enigmatic private who tends the horses on the base, and he interacts with the other characters. Frankly, I didn't enjoy this story as much as The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. The characters weren't anywhere near as believable, and their motivations weren't as transparent or understandable. The ending was also somewhat predictable. The Ballad of the Sad Café is the shortest of McCullers' novels or novellas, weighing in at 60 pages. It's the story of a strange, unpredictable relationship between the standoffish businesswoman who dominates the culture of a small town, and a dwarf hunchback who shows up one day claiming to be her long-lost nephew. How the two of them interact in the story is strange, to say the least, and not wholly explained in the story. This creates an enigmatic atmosphere, and as the story progresses and it becomes obvious we're not going to receive an explanation of things

Magnificent McCullers

Carson McCullers, one of America's greatest Southern writers, was often misunderstood, as many people were put off by or unwilling to deal with her (at the time) controversial subject matter. MCCullers used the grotesque as exaggerated symbols of everyday experience. The loneliness and isolation of her gothic-like characters were merely extreme examples of feelings we all have, though magnified and intensified to the nth degree. Tennessee Williams, in his introduction to MCCullers' "Reflections in a Golden Eye", posed the question (in a mock dialogue) most people asked about writers of the 'gothic' school such as Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor, Katherine Anne Porter and Eudora Welty: "Why do they write about such dreadful things?" Williams replies, " In my opinion it is most simply definable as a sense, an intuition of an underlying dreadfulness in modern society.. Why have they got to use..symbols of the grotesque and the violent? Because a book is short and a man's life is long... The awfulness has to be compressed." McCullers, unlike any writer I have ever read, pierces the heart of themes such as love, isolation, and loneliness with her lucid, poetic prose. Tennessee Williams, in Virginia Spencer Carr's biography of McCullers summed up McCullers' writing as follows: "I have used the word 'heart', but it is not an adequate word to describe the core of Carson McCullers' genius....I believe, in fact I know, that there are many, many with heart who lack the need or gift to express it. And therefore Carson McCullers is what I would call a necessary writer: She owned the heart and the deep understanding of it, but in addition she had that 'tongue of angels' that gave her power to sing of it, to make of it an anthem."

The unique lady of the "South"

Until very recently, it was quite difficult to find a nice hardback copy of Mc Culler's novels. Each one of them is absolutely priceless and unforgettable; believe me when I tell you that "The Ballad of the Sad Café" is one of those stories that long remain on your mind. Mc Culler's novels, clearly influenced by Faulkner, surpass the master himself in magnetism, , power of storytelling and above all, characterization. If you add to all this a dose of gothic dark strangely ambivalent sense of humour, the result is certainly a writer utterly impossible to classify, novels that you really enjoy reading and characters that you are very unlikely to forget. Besides I am fully in love with the Library of America hardback editions and Mc Cullers certainly deserves to be included in this collection.Later, if you want to give yourself a treat, go and buy her autobiography, although unfinished, a memorable book.