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 an artist hope for? On the other hand, for a perfectionist like Carson McCullers, who rewrote over and over again until the gem was sufficiently polished, it might have been a horror…. [As] a specialized collection, it will prove a valuable appendage to devotees of the author's major works….

Her dramatic sense of detail was there from the beginning in character sketches and evolved to maturity in her later stories and essays. The essays are remarkably lucid prose. Worth the price of the book are the seven brief essays on "Writers and Writing."…

Carson felt all good prose writing has an element of poetry as well. Her own prose is better poetry than the nine poems included here. It would have...