In December 1936 Story magazine published "Wunderkind", the first fictional work by teenage author Carson Smith to appear in print. In retrospect her choice of title appears doubly ironic. In the story the term refers to the young protagonist, Frances,...
With Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, and Katherine Anne Porter, Carson McCullers is an explorer of the southern grotesque, for the ambience of her fiction is always southern, whatever its geographic locale, and her characters are the solitary, the...
With Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, and Katherine Anne Porter, Carson McCullers is an explorer of the Southern grotesque, for the ambiance of her fiction is always Southern, whatever its geographic locale, and her characters are the solitary, the...
Carson McCullers (February 19, 1917 – September 29, 1967) was an American writer. Her first novel explores the spiritual isolation of misfits and outcasts of the South. Her other writings deal with a wide scope of personal and social issues in...
CARSON McCULLERS A Life By Josyane Savigneau Translated From the French by Joan E. Howard Houghton Mifflin. 370 pp. $30 Carson McCullers was a strange and in some ways sad woman. She never really grew out of adolescence throughout...
Until her death in 1967 at age fifty, Carson McCullers was noted for her youthful appearance. She was photographed after the publication of her seminal work, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, at a book signing, "looking like a drowsy-eyed child who had not...
Today is Saturday, Sept. 29, the 272nd day of 2007. There are 93 days left in the year.Today's Highlight in History:On Sept. 29, 1978, Pope John Paul I was found dead in his Vatican apartment just over a month after becoming head of the Roman...
Actor Roscoe Lee Browne, whose rich voice and dignified bearing brought him an Emmy Award and a Tony nomination, has died. He was 81.Browne died early Wednesday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center after a long battle with cancer, said Alan Nierob, a spokesman for the family.Browne's...
In the following essay, Carr discusses events in McCullers' personal life that were incorporated into The Ballad of the Sad Café. The love-triangle between the characters of Amelia Evans, the hunchback Lymon, and Macy grew out of relationships in McCullers's life, according to Carr.
[Carson McCullers] is governed by the aesthetics of the primitive. This means that her overview is essentially anti-realistic. She has cut herself off from the world of ordinary experience and ordinary human beings who might entertain ordinary ideas. Her people are bizarre, freakish, lonely, hermaphroditic. This aesthetic dictates an intense concentration on man's most urgent emotional needs: a communion of dialogue and love. For her, further, the truth of the fable is the truth of the heart. It is n...
Carson McCullers' short story "The Ballad of the Sad Café" is a good short story because of its interesting conflict associated with the love triangle between Miss Amelia, Cousin Lymon, and Marvin Macy. The conflict emphasizes the story's theme of the loved versus the beloved and shows the different forms that love can take.
