Carson McCullers: Complete Novels

by Carson McCullers

When The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was published in 1940, Carson McCullers was instantly recognized as one of the most promising writers of her generation. The novels that followed established her as a master of Southern Gothic.

"McCullers' gift," writes Joyce Carol Oates, "was to evoke, through an accumulation of images and musically repeated phrases, the singularity of experience, not to pass judgment on it." McCullers effortlessly conveyed the raw anguish of her characters and the weird beauty of their perceptions. Set in small Georgia towns that are at once precisely observed and mythically resonant, McCullers' novels explore the strange, sometimes grotesque inner lives of characters who are often marginal and misunderstood. Above all, McCullers possessed an unmatched ability to capture the bewilderment and fragile wonder of adolescence.

In The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, an enigmatic deaf-mute draws out the haunted confessions of an itinerant worker, a young girl, a black doctor, and the widowed owner of a small-town café. Two shorter works, Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941) and The Ballad of the Sad Café (1943), use melodramatic scenarios and freakish characters to explore the disfiguring violence of desire. The Member of the Wedding (1946), on which the play and film were based, tells of a young girl's fascination with her brother's wedding and is perhaps McCullers' most moving and accomplished novel. In Clock Without Hands (1960), the story of a terminally ill druggist, McCullers produces some of her most forceful and indignant social criticism.

Edited by Carlos Dews.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Literature, Novels, American, 20th Century, Southern

827 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2001

About the author

Carson McCullers was an American novelist, short-story writer, playwright, essayist, and poet. Her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), explores the spiritual isolation of misfits and outcasts in a small town of the Southern United States. Her other novels have similar themes. Most are set in the Deep South.
McCullers's work is often described as Southern Gothic and indicative of her Southern roots. Critics also describe her writing and eccentric characters as universal in scope. Her stories have been adapted to stage and film. A stage adaptation of her novel The Member of the Wedding (1946), which captures a young girl's feelings at her brother's wedding, made a successful Broadway run in 1950–51.

Reviews

[Pamela · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some 68 years have passed since the publication of "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter". At first I noticed the rather "old-style" writing where, for instance, in introducing a character every physical detail about that character is set forth directly, a style we seldom see in current fiction. I soon stopped noticing that though, and fell into the rhythm of this superb writer's attentive prose and her insightful and haunting depiction of the misfits and outcasts of the American South during the depression era. These characters---John Singer, a deaf mute and the central figure in this story, Mick Kelly, a 14 year old free-spirited girl enthralled with music and the songs in her head, Jack Blount, a drunken drifter who espouses an unpopular communistic philosophy, Dr. Copeland, a well-educated and outspoken black man living with the disappointment of his children's lesser ambitions, and Biff Brannon, who owns and tends the New York Cafe where all come to eat, drink and mingle (though seldom communicate)---could be any of us living and struggling with our modern demons here in the 21st century.

This is a story the encapsulates the conditions of the Depression Era in American history, with all its despair, upheaval and uncertainty. Yet it transcends that period in its social commentary on civil rights, politics, religion, family relations, physical disabilities, pending wars, spousal abuse, co-dependency, aging, loneliness, and the need to love and be loved. These issues are timeless, as are the character traits of self-absorption and isolation which these individuals embody in ample quantities.

This is not a sentimental story, nor is it particularly uplifting in its realistic perspective. It does not end on a happy note, or even a conclusive one. I found it a thoroughly satisfying read, but I know many might not. "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter" is an insightful, revealing, and unapologetic look at the innermost workings of disparate characters living as we all do, day-to-day. It is a reflection of life as it often is, with little adornment and much complexity.

[Randy Tatel · Rating 5 out of 5]

faulkner is a windbag...give me mccullers any, no, every day...

[Melissa Duclos · Rating 5 out of 5]

On the first page, this book promises to deliver a murder, which by itself would be a good enough reason to keep reading. I kept reading, though, for the characters. Using an omniscient narrator, McCullers enters the heads of her five main characters--a Captain and a Major in the army, both of their wives, and a Private--all of whom are somehow broken. McCullers handles them all with stunning sympathy and love. This book delivers intrigue, sex, naked horseback riding, a fey little Filipino manservant, and yes, a murder, all within the confines of an army barracks, and all while making you care about these people as much as the author does.

[Sadia · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am not a fan, this is what I read when I wanna sleep, you’d like it if you’re a big fan of Steinbeck. Otherwise I was very bored.

[Martin Hernandez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Siguiendo mi exploración de los autores estadounidenses publicados por la Library of America , me decidí por esta autora, desconocida para mí hasta que leí una reseña en la Revista Algarabía, y debo decir que quedé muy agradecido con la revista (por darme la oportunidad de este tipo de "descubrimientos") y la editorial (por poner en mis manos todas sus novelas en un solo tomo). Aquí están mis reseñas (por separado, para cada novela):
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
Reflections in a Golden Eye
The Member of the Wedding
Clock Without Hands

[Marialyce · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is hard to say how this book affected me. I think its tone of desperation for the people living during this time was the main current for the author. While her writing was able to depict characters and settings well, the overwhelming theme was one that offered little hope for the situations of racism, aloneness, and boredom. To be stuck in this reality that one had no ability to change one's life and that the only way out was through death was depressing. Perhaps the currents of that time following the depression and pre World War 2 produced this morose feeling for the author and her writing.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

After reading this interview with Suzanne Vega

http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/LOA_Veg...

I totally feel the need to read this book, and I'm really glad that I did, as McCullers attention to detail is amazing. She's such a great writer and I'm honored to add this book to my permanent collection.

[Judy Vanderhule · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this because I like to read books considered "Classics". This is the kind of book you need to talk about with someone else because there are so many layers of characterization. You just want to put on your "pyschoanalyst's hat". It is a compelling story and well told.

[Laurie · Rating 5 out of 5]

For some reason, I had never read this book before. Although written in 1940, it's themes are very relevant today. She delicately tackles race and disability. She's a wonderful writer and the story is compelling. It's definitely worth reading if you never have.

[K. Fox (Cahill) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not my favorite style of writing—slow, languorous, with random time-skips and multiple POVs. Another reviewer mentioned this style reflected Steinbeck and that’s the most accurate way to describe it.

[Mary Mendenhall · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter....for some reason I could only look it up her collection. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is an excellent read, so I may read more of her stuff.

[Ken Ryu · Rating 5 out of 5]

McCullers is a pure writer. Her heroes are the giants of literature including Dostoevsky, Proust, Joyce, Faulkner and Tolstoy. She writes what she knows. She cares for the details. She searches for the subtle feelings that make relationships deep and complex. Her stories are filled with memories of her life. Her childhood growing up in the segregated south as a young girl in Georgia come alive. Her interest and talent playing piano are recorded. Her feelings of injustice and disgust at the treatment of southern blacks originate from her youth. As a young girl and aspiring writer her center migrates to New York. The pace and color of the many denizens of the city build her cast of characters.

No matter her age, locale or work, an underlying sense of desperation, isolation and vertigo is felt through her words. In her own life, she experienced the sudden deaths of her mother and father. She struggled with her first marriage, alcoholism and mental health. She courageously writes about her struggles. How could she not? She was born to write.

Her attention to detail has Proustian influence. Her emotional disturbances recalls Dostoevsky. Her southern characters and sensibilities have connection to Tennessee Williams and Faulkner. Her pacing is carefully planned like Tolstoy. With her intense focus in all these areas, her success with her plays makes sense. Her work is unique in that she drops the reader in and slowly paints the scenes and carves out a small slice of time in which to focus. Her stories do not have clean or obvious conclusions. Her representative style is more lifelike and features gradual changes and unexpected events. Like life, you are never sure what will take place next. Sometimes the story concludes without any major events, and other times they come to abrupt and harsh stops.

This collection features McCullers short stories, plays and other writings, including an autobiography. Throughout the collection, you see McCullers' unique writing style and tone clearly. There is sorrow, reflection and vitality. McCullers is an original and one of the more interesting writers of the 1900s.

[Imlac · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ballad of the Sad Café**** 12 September 2024

According to Mary Doyle Springer, Forms of the Modern Novella, this novella is an apologue, seeking to maximize the truth of: "Human affairs move as inevitably as the turn of a wheel. When the wheel is up, the instructive, healing, nurturing centers of humanity (home, store, café, medical office) provide some temporary comfort against the inevitable downswing: the return (like a ballad refrain) to evil, lovelessness, and loneliness."

That's certainly possible, but McCullers herself emphasizes the theme of the weirdness of love: how we can fall in love with the most unexpected strange person; and how being beloved can be especially burdensome and restricting. The triangle of Miss Amelia, Cousin Lymon, and Marvin Macy vividly illustrates this theme.

“But what sort of thing is love? First of all, it is a joint experience between two persons, but that fact does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only the stimulus for all the stored-up love which has lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness.

Now, the beloved can also be of any description: the most outlandish people can be the stimulus for love. Yes, and the lover may see this as clearly as anyone else–but that does not affect the evolution of his love one whit. Therefore, the quality and value of any love is determined solely by the lover himself."

The writing is faux-naif, but charming and musical. McCullers knows how to include weird details and descriptions without losing the overall tenor of the narration.

Much has been made of her use of grotesques in characterization, and that's probably what most accounts for the didactic rather than mimetic intent of the work. Still, imaginative and memorable characters, especially Miss Amelia.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is only story that I read from this anthology. I thought it was quite remarkable in its exploration of social problems and their effect on individuals, especially considering that the author was only 23. For the first 150 pages, I was fascinated by the character development. The middle of the book did not keep my interest as much because I expected to have a better sense of where the story was going by then. As the plot began to progress in the last third of the book, I became more interested. The resolution of the fates of the characters were handled well and made sense to me but parts of the conclusion seemed muddy.
I liked the author’s method of shifting focus between the five main characters and her development of minor characters, such as Portia and her grandfather. I thought the social commentary was incisive and sensitive. I especially enjoyed the clashing of ideas between Dr. Copeland, an African American intellectual and physician, and Jake Blount, an itinerant worker and would-be labor organizer. I was also impressed with the way McCullers slipped in reactions to news from Europe in 1939. Although these events will have a big impact on the world, average Americans were only beginning to appreciate their significance.

[Jake Bittle]

Her weaknesses are just as fascinating as her strengths, if not more so. "Southern Gothic" doesn't quite do it justice. To read these in succession is to see her keep attacking the same question from a series of different angles, each presenting a bigger challenge than the last.

My personal ranking:

1. The Member of the Wedding (Pure bliss to read from start to finish)
2. Reflections In A Golden Eye (A jewel)
3. Clock Without Hands (Tangled, challenging, far less read than it should be)
4. The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter (Beautiful pieces but she can't put them together)
5. The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (Hits a dead end going 90mph)

[LMSP · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and The Ballad of Sad Café were 5 stars. The other stories were 3 stars.

[Gina · Rating 3 out of 5]

6

[Teabutterfly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well I'm a fan, so read them all. Esp. loved the ballad of the sad café.

[Tim McKay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading Carson's books is very fatiguing, she wrote so well the reader could feel the character's emotions.

[Joe Sweeney]

The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter: 5⭐️
The Member Of The Wedding: 4.5⭐️
Reflections In A Golden Eye: 4.5⭐️
The Ballad Of The Sad Cafe: 4.5⭐️
Clock Without Hands: 3⭐️ (I’m not dropping this any lower than 3, but I’ll qualify here that this is easily the worst thing McCullers ever wrote. I have a heightened sympathy to all her work and because of that I was moved to tears a few times while reading, but if anyone else wrote this novel—and that’s the worst thing about it too, it feels for the most part like anyone could’ve written it—I probably would’ve hated it. Definitely not a neglected masterpiece.)

https://youtube.com/shorts/BL8Oe9oh7m...

[Kate Savage · Rating 4 out of 5]

"He waited for the black, terrible anger as though for some beast out of the night. But it did not come to him. His bowels seemed weighted with lead, and he walked slowly and lingered against fences and the cold, wet walls of buildings by the way. Descent into the depths until at last there was no further chasm below. He touched the solid bottom of despair and there took ease."
-The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

Read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, and if you also fall in love with these characters -- the brilliant little imp-tomboys and the enraged, intelligent black men -- then sit longer with these lesser-known works of McCullers. Her stories may be despairing, but the characters that she animates are complex and wonderful.

A joy to find an American book from the 40s with great instincts and ideas on gender, race, class, without being a self-consciously 'political work.'

[Barbara Dzikowski · Rating 5 out of 5]

Carson McCullers is a literary genius, and THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER is a masterpiece. I haven't been so deeply moved by a novel in many a moon, and I'm so glad that I discovered this work in this particular period of life. In THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER, McCullers' ability to get inside each of her characters' minds and motives is nothing short of amazing. Her characters are flawed, yet their humanity shines through on every page, as does their abiding sense of loneliness. A deep, troubling, stirring piece of literature.

THE BALLAD OF THE SAD CAFE was very well-written but lacked the poignancy and relate-ability of THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER, whose characters were drawn with detailed, realistic strokes, not the unsympathetic caricatures of THE BALLAD OF THE SAD CAFE.

I can't wait to read the other novels in this book.

[Alice · Rating 5 out of 5]

Carson McCullers works have always touched something in me, something deep. Maybe old wounds. The way she writes her characters, their anguish, the way they live their lives, the view of the world we see through their eyes is familiar. Her stories take place in small Georgia towns, far from my own experience in a Queens suburb, yet McCullers' novels explore the lives of those who don't feel peace, don't feel at home, don't belong. We live everywhere.

I first saw the film 'Member of the Wedding" as a child of twelve, the same age as Frankie Addams, before reading the book years later and felt the pain of her loneliness, her longing to belong, It is a beautifully written story.

[Barksdale Penick · Rating 3 out of 5]

This novella is set in a small town in Mississippi, before air conditioning and other modern conveniences. The lead characters are quirky to the point of being unrealistic. The lead character is a mannish woman who is a shrewd business operator who shows her vulnerable side to an unlikely companion. I found the centrsl characters overdrawn, but the setting realisitc and the bit players believable. The plot and structure seemed artificial to me, at times, so I cannot give the book more than a three rating. A pleasant enough read, but not powerful art.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

My mom turned me on to Carson McCullers and I have to say that she is in my top five these days. Maybe it's just the southern connection, but I absolutely love her writing. They are not cheerful stories by any means, but they run deep and stay with you for a while. My favorites were Clock Without Hands, The Member of the Wedding, and, of course, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. My least favorite was Reflections in a Golden Eye.

[D. Travers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading The February House (and watching the weird movie of Reflections in a Golden Eye) motivated me to finally read McCullers. Quite a talented writer and amazingly perceptive for someone so young. Finished Heart..., which I really enjoyed, but definitely more character than plot driven. Going to switch to nonfiction now then come back to read Reflections.... Update: Reflections was great, Sad Cafe even better.

[Becky · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The Ballad of the Sad Cafe" is one of the best short stories I've ever read. Beautifully written; Carson provides deep insight into the heart-breaking fragility of human nature. Another Southern writer that's not afraid to look straight into the eyes of depression without flinching. "Clock Without Hands" bends towards Camus' existentialism, but ends in nihilistic despair. "The Member of the Wedding" is the female equivalent of "Catcher in the Rye."

[Heather Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love her writing, and finally with this edition I got to read all her novels. My favorite is Reflections in a Golden Eye. I love reading old books like this, especially when she uses words like "hobbledehoy". She is a very descriptive writer and a good storyteller...She died young (50s). Like Jimi Hendrix, I wish she could have had time to do more. But the five works here are amazing in themselves, and this compilation, with a timeline of the author's life at the end, is a treasure.

[Joan · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my absolute favourite books. I read it years ago, then read a biography of Carson McCullers which made her sound like a self-centred person. So I read 'A Member of the Wedding' to see why I liked it so much first time round - and I loved it all over again. Just goes to prove the author is NOT the book

[Dina · Rating 3 out of 5]

So, I really appreciated The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and Member of the Wedding. As a naturalist novel, I thought Reflections of a Golden Eye was interesting, but rather disturbing. And Ballad of the Sad Cafe was just bizarre. All of the texts I read were well written and interesting to analyze as a student, but would I ever read them again on purpose? Maybe the first two.