The Haunted Boy
- 64 pages
- 3 hours of reading
His hand sought the adjacent flesh and sorrow paralleled desire in the immense complexity of love.
Carson McCullers, an American author, is celebrated for her fiction, often characterized as Southern Gothic, which deeply explores the spiritual isolation of misfits and outcasts. Her work masterfully captures the complexities of the human psyche, delving into themes of loneliness and unrequited love. While some categorize her style as Southern Realism, it draws inspiration from Russian Realism, showcasing a profound understanding of human frailty and the struggles of the marginalized. McCullers's distinctive voice and profound insights into the human condition solidify her significance in literature.







His hand sought the adjacent flesh and sorrow paralleled desire in the immense complexity of love.
"Celebrated worldwide for her masterly novels, Carson McCullers was equally accomplished, and equally moving, when writing in shorter forms. This Library of America volume brings together for the first time her twenty extraordinary stories, along with plays, essays, memoirs, and poems. Here are the indelible tales "Madame Zilensky and the King of Finland" and "A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud." as well as her previously uncollected story about the civil rights movement, "The March"; her award-winning Broadway play The Member of the Wedding and the unpublished teleplay The Sojourner; twenty-two essays; and the revealing unfinished memoir Illumination and Night Glare. This wide-ranging gathering of shorter works reveals new depths and dimensions of the writer whom V.S. Pritchett praised for her "courageous imagination--one that is bold enough to consider the terrible in human nature without loss of nerve, calm, dignity, or love.""--Dust jacket
Includes four stories: "Wunderkind," "The Jockey," "Madame Zilensky and the King of Finland," and "A Tree, A Rock and A Cloud."
With delicacy of perception and memory, humour and pathos, Carson McCullers spreads before us the three phases of a weekend crisis in the life of a motherless twelve-year-old girl. Within the span of a few hours, the irresistible, hoydenish Frankie passionately plays out her fantasies at her elder brother's wedding. Through a perilous skylight we look into the mind of a child torn between her yearning to belong and the urge to run away.
More than thirty years after it was written, the autobiography of Carson McCullers, Illumination and Night Glare , will be published for the first time. McCullers, one of the most gifted writers of her generation—the author of Member of the Wedding, Reflections in a Golden Eye, and The Ballad of Sad Cafe —died of a stroke at the age of fifty before finishing this, her last manuscript. Editor Carlos L. Dews has faithfully brought her story back to life, complete with never-before-published letters between McCullers and her husband Reeves, and an outline of her most famous novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter .Looking back over her life from a precocious childhood in Georgia to her painful decline from a series of crippling strokes, McCullers offers poignant and unabashed remembrances of her early writing success, her family attachments, a troubled marriage to a failed writer, and friendships with literary and film luminaries (Gypsy Rose Lee, Richard Wright, Isak Dinesen, John Huston, Marilyn Monroe), and the intense relationships of the important women in her life.
A single volume collection of the celebrated writer's novels includes the complete texts of five novels.
At the height of her literary career, Carson McCullers showcases her exceptional talent in short fiction, blending her skills as a novelist, dramatist, and poet. Her work reflects deep emotional insight and explores complex themes of loneliness, identity, and the human experience, captivating readers with her unique narrative style and rich character development.
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.
Set in Georgia on the eve of court-ordered integration, Clock Without Hands contains McCullers's most poignant statement on race, class, and justice. A small-town druggist dying of leukemia calls himself and his community to account in this tale of change and changelessness, of death and the death-in-life that is hate. It is a tale, as McCullers herself wrote, of "response and responsibility -- of a man toward his own livingness".
A collection of Carson McCullers' work, including stories, essays, articles, poems, and her writing on writing. These pieces, written mostly before McCullers was nineteen, provide insight into her life and her gifts and growth as a writer. It contains the working outline of The Mute, which became her novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.