The Collected Stories of Carson McCullers (1987)
By Carson McCullers

Though best known for her novels, Carson McCullers was also a writer of dazzling short fiction. The novellas and stories collected here span her entire career, from her apprenticeship in the nineteen-thirties through her years of mastery in the forties and fifties. They explore her signature themes: wounded adolescence, loneliness in marriage, the human comedy as played in the American South. Though her subject matter is often grotesque and her situations extreme, McCullers is not a sensationalist; she is instead a poet and a symbolist, a kind of second Hawthorne, a seeker after the luminous meanings behind the things of this world.