Biography EssayWith 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 ...
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One of America's most unique writers, Carson McCullers (1917-1967) wrote about isolation, loneliness and failures in human communication in popular novels and plays set in the Southern United States, ...
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Along with such contemporaries as Tennessee Williams and Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers is considered a leading author of the American Southern literary tradition. While McCullers is best known a...
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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 geographi...
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Carson McCullers is best known as a novelist, for it is her early novels, written when she was in her twenties, that assure her position among the preeminent writers of her generation. But McCullers's...
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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 stor...
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Carson McCullers has generally been viewed as a novelist who produced a small but important body of work in the Southern gothic genre. Recent critics have focused on a variety of subtle themes in her ...
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In the following essay, Phillips discusses how McCullers' works fit into the genre of the modern Gothic novel.
The Modern Gothic in American literature, the genre of the grotesque, is currently...
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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...
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Critical Essay by Irving H. Buchen
McCullers images the artist as a screen on which is projected a series of emerging and expanding stills whose flickering breaks dislocate the continuity of causality...
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Critical Essay by Coleman Rosenberger
Here in one omnibus volume ["The Ballad of the Sad Café"], which includes her three novels, a half dozen short stories, and an unfamiliar lon...
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Critical Essay by William P. Clancy
The art of Carson McCullers has been called "Gothic." Perhaps it is—superficially. Certainly her day-to-day world, her little Southern towns, a...
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Critical Essay by Dayton Kohler
[Few writers] are as consistent and thoroughgoing as Carson McCullers in creating a sustained body of work. This underlying unity is partly the result of her prevailing...
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Critical Essay by V. S. Pritchett
Miss Carson McCullers [is] the most remarkable novelist, I think, to come out of America for a generation. Coverage is ignored by her. She is a regional writer from t...
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Critical Essay by Jane Hart
To all appearances Carson McCullers belongs to a School, the Gothic School of Southern writers unconsciously established by William Faulkner, a school supposedly concerned ...
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Critical Essay by Carson Mccullers
Spiritual isolation is the basis of most of my themes. My first book was concerned with this, almost entirely, and all of my books since, in one way or another. Love...
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Critical Essay by Rumer Godden
[For] me not a word could be added or taken away from this marvel of a novel ["Clock Without Hands"] by Carson McCullers.
Her talent is extraordinary: the ...
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Critical Essay by Catharine Hughes
[Clock Without Hands] probes intensely the human spirit, yet captures indelibly the sights and the sounds, the sorrow and the tensions of the South [Mrs. McCullers] ...
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Critical Essay by Donald Emerson
All outward experience of the characters of Clock Without Hands … is conditioned by a sense of moral isolation, a feeling of despair, and baffled search for an ...
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Critical Essay by Chester E. Eisinger
[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 wo...
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Critical Essay by Klaus Lubbers
Together with such other writers as Katherine Anne Porter and Eudora Welty, Mrs. McCullers forms a Southern triad that has carried on and modified the basic Faulknerian...
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Critical Essay by Jack B. Moore
Carson McCullers has frequently employed mythic patterns to explicate the psychological tensions urging her characters…. The people in her books, stripped of all...
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Critical Essay by Oliver Evans
[The Square Root of Wonderful] is to a large extent autobiographical. When it appeared in book form, the author explained in her preface:
In The Square Root of Wonderfu...
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Critical Essay by Robert Drake
In the preface to the published version of her play The Square Root of Wonderful (1958), the late Carson McCullers posed and answered a question that every writer has co...
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Critical Essay by Jeanne Kinney
In a sense [The Mortgaged Heart] is a writer's dream—to have everything one ever wrote, including a rough outline for a novel, published. What more could ...
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Critical Essay by John Alfred Avant
When a writer dies leaving early work uncollected, it is often uncollected for a very good reason; and readers who come to The Mortgaged Heart without previous expo...
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Critical Essay by Joseph R. Millichap
The use of the bizarre theory of love offered by the narrator of [Ballad of the Sad Café] as a formula for interpreting all of McCullers' fiction ha...
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Critical Essay by John Mcnally
When one reads the novella [The Ballad of the Sad Café] in the understanding that the narrator is a character in the story, he notices a subtle but significant sh...
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Critical Essay by Richard M. Cook
The limits of McCullers's accomplishments are real. One reads through her works with a sharp sense of the highly individual, almost eccentric nature of her ach...
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Critical Essay by Richard Gray
There is a peculiar quality of isolation about Carson McCullers's work … that owes some of its intensity perhaps to her own status vis-à-vis the Sou...
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Critical Essay by Robert Phillips
[If we take Carson McCullers] at her word, and I believe we should, [the] theme of spiritual isolation is the cornerstone to her house of fiction. One of the smallest...
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I Love You! That is what people say when they want to tell someone how they feel towards them, but this is not the only way to express feelings of love there are many more. Carson McCullers, the autho...
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Carson McCullers
Carson McCullers
(Lula) Carson (Smith) McCullers
