From the Publisher
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.