Best Selling Books by Carson McCullers

This collection of nineteen stories includes "Madame Zilensky and the King of Finland," "The Haunted Boy," "The Member of the Wedding," "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe," several early stories, and other important works.

When she was only twenty-three, Carson McCullers''s first novel created a literary sensation. She was very special, one of America''s superlative writers who conjures up a vision of existence as terrible as it is real, who takes us on shattering voyages into the depths of the spiritual isolation that underlies the human condition. This novel is the work of a supreme artist, Carson McCullers''s enduring masterpiece. The heroine is the strange young girl, Mick Kelly. The setting is a small Southern town, the cosmos universal and eternal. The characters are the damned, the voiceless, the rejected. Some fight their loneliness with violence and depravity, Some with sex or drink, and some -- like Mick -- with a quiet, intensely personal search for beauty. "From the Paperback edition."

Written to Newton Arvin shortly after McCullers was released from a hospitalization. She writes to Arvin about similar interests (reading Proust), and her recent hospitalization, and sends greetings to various mutual friends of theirs at Smith College. She writes, "I wish you and I could rent a little house on the Maine coast ... -- that would be good."

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