When she was only 23, 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.
Time included the novel in its 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.
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Have you read it (or seen the 1968 movie with Alan Arkin)?
