Stories, Plays, & Other Writings: Complete Stories / The Member of the Wedding: A Play / The Sojourner / The Square Root of Wonderful / Essays, Poems & Autobiography

As a novelist, Carson McCullers created such classics of Southern literature as The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and The Ballad of the Sad Café. But she began her career writing short stories, and never stopped. This Library of America volume offers a landmark gathering of McCullers’s shorter works, including all her published stories, complete here for the first time, plus plays, essays, poems, and an unfinished autobiography.McCullers had a special genius for crafting concise, indelible portraits of characters struggling to feel at home in the world. From precocious early efforts such as “Sucker,” the first work she dared show her family, and “Wunderkind,” the tragicomic tale of a piano prodigy published when she was just nineteen, to her final published work of fiction, the previously uncollected civil rights allegory “The March,” which appeared in Redbook just months before her death in 1967, her stories display her characteristic sensitivity and haunting strangeness. In “A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud.” an aging drifter tells a twelve-year-old boy about the peculiar “science” he has fashioned to cope with lost love. “The Sojourner” follows an expatriate’s return to America, where he comes face to face with his ex-wife’s happy second marriage and his own uncertain path at middle age.McCullers’s dramatic works are represented here by the play The Member of the Wedding (1950), adapted from her 1946 novel at the urging of her close friend Tennessee Williams. Like Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, it is a great American poem for the stage. At its center is tomboy Frankie Addams, a motherless adolescent neglected by her father and utterly bored with life in small-town Georgia until romantic longing is ignited by her older brother’s wedding. A hit on Broadway, running for more than five hundred performances, it won the Drama Critics’ Circle Award and soon inspired a film. Also included are the long out-of-print The Square Root of Wonderful, her neglected Broadway comedy of 1958, and an adaptation of her story “The Sojourner” for the television program Omnibus, presented here in a text based on a previously unpublished typescript by McCullers and accompanied, as an appendix, by a transcription of the significantly different version broadcast in December 1953.The volume is rounded out by twenty-two essays—among them childhood reminiscences, travel pieces, reflections on life during wartime in the 1940s, and observations on other writers and on the writer’s craft. Gathered as well are McCullers’s poems and the fascinating Illumination and Night Glare, an unfinished autobiography from late in her life, first published in a scholarly edition in 1999 and here newly edited for the general reader.