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 exposure to Carson McCullers may wonder whether her reputation is justified. This posthumous collection contains 14 stories …, an outline for The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, some nonfiction magazine pieces, and five poems. The stories are clearly apprentice works, some of them from the "How I Grew Up Last Summer" school. They use typical McCullers subjects (painful adolescence, loneliness in the big city, youthful exposure to adult sexuality), but what is beautifully fragile in her best writing is too slight in these early exercises to hold one's interest. Most of the nonfiction is undistinguished. A Thanksgiving article from Mademoiselle is surprisingly like a blandly pious holiday sermon; and a maudlin recollection of a legless girl with whom McCullers once spent Christmas in...