Carson McCullers

Frankie Addams, a motherless twelve-year-old raised by her father and the family's African-American cook, struggles with conflicting feelings about her brother's upcoming wedding.

"In The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940), one of the most extraordinary debuts in modern American literature, an enigmatic deaf-mute draws out the confessions of an itinerant worker, a young girl, a doctor, and a widowed cafe proprietor. The disfiguring violence of desire is explored with shocking intensity in two shorter works, Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941), a tale of murder and madness at an army base, and The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1943),...

Major Weldon Penderton, a repressed homosexual whose career is languishing in the monotony of postwar Georgia, becomes obsessed with a private who is, in turn, obsessed with Penderton's frustrated and sensual wife Leonora.