With the publication of her first novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers, all of twenty-three, became a literary sensation. With its profound sense of moral isolation and its compassionate glimpses into its characters' inner lives, the novel is considered McCullers' finest work, an enduring masterpiece first published by Houghton Mifflin in 1940. At its center is the deaf-mute John Singer, who becomes the confidant for various types...

Tall, awkward, and lonely, Frankie Addams has a vivid imagination but no friends. She spends most of her time in the kitchen, pouring out her heart to Berenice, the gentle family cook and housekeeper. Frankie's jealousy of her brother's impending marriage, and her curious belief that she must accompany him and his bride on their honeymoon in order to belong, drives her to strange measures. She devises a desperate plan, reinventing herself as the seemingly...

"While working as an intern in the archives at the Harry Ransom Center, Jenn Shapland encounters the love letters of Carson McCullers and a woman named Annemarie - letters that are tender, intimate, and unabashed in their feelings. Shapland recognizes herself in the letters' language - but does not see McCullers as history has portrayed her. And so, Shapland is compelled to undertake a recovery of the full narrative and language of McCullers's life:...

V. S. Pritchett called her "a genius." Gore Vidal described her as a "beloved novelist of singular brilliance ... Of all the Southern writers, she is the most apt to endure ..." And Tennessee Williams said, "The only real writer the South ever turned out, was Carson." She was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia. Her dream was to become a concert pianist, though she'd been writing since she was sixteen and the influence of music was evident...

Miss Amelia runs the town's only cafe and controls the locals through the careful distribution of her secretly brewed hooch. Her eccentric existence is threatened with the arrival of a dwarf who claims kinship and the reappearance of her rejected husband.