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Carson McCullers was born in 1917. She is the critically acclaimed author of several popular novels in the 1940s and '50s, including The Member of the Wedding (1946). Her novels frequently depicted life in small towns of the southeastern United States and were marked by themes of loneliness and spiritual isolation. McCullers suffered from ill health most of her adult life, including a series of strokes that began when she was in her 20s; she died at the age of 50. The Member of the Wedding was dramatized for the stage in the 1950s and filmed in 1952 and 1997. Other films based on her books are Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967, with Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando), The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1968, starring Alan Arkin) and The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1991).
The Heart is a Lonely Hunger was a sensation of sorts, a critical success, but too remote from common experience to win wide popularity. This new book is considerably more bizarre, almost pathosexual, if there is such a word. It has virtually none of the former's strong positive note; no underlying social significance. It is an unhealthy sort of book, dealing as it does with mental and emotional degenerates, a voluptuous woman with a husband who is sexually attracted to her lovers; there is another woman who is mentally unbalanced, there is a private (the scene of the story is a fort in the South) who is obsessed by the naked beauty of the vampire . An episode played to full capacity of its pathological trimmings, its morbid fancies - a book that will appeal to readers interested in the abnormal. 'ware, public libraries. (Kirkus Reviews)
