Carson McCullers

Bloom's Modern Critical Views

by Harold Bloom (Editor)

Carson McCullers was a diverse and multitalented writer who produced two plays and numerous short stories, essays, and poems. But it is her fiction, including The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter , The Member of the Wedding , and The Ballad of the Sad Café , that established her as a key voice of the 1940s and '50s. Critics have praised her lyrical evocations of the yearning for love, always tempered by a harsh acknowledgment of the futility of the quest. This edition of full-length critical essays offers illuminating discussions of McCullers’s work and its place in the American canon. This latest title in the Bloom’s Modern Critical Views series is bolstered by a chronology, a bibliography, notes on the contributors, and an introduction from noted literary scholar Harold Bloom.

192 pages, Library Binding

First published November 1, 1986

About the author

Harold Bloom was an American literary critic and the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. In 2017, Bloom was called "probably the most famous literary critic in the English-speaking world." After publishing his first book in 1959, Bloom wrote more than 50 books, including over 40 books of literary criticism, several books discussing religion, and one novel. He edited hundreds of anthologies concerning numerous literary and philosophical figures for the Chelsea House publishing firm. Bloom's books have been translated into more than 40 languages. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1995.
Bloom was a defender of the traditional Western canon at a time when literature departments were focusing on what he derided as the "school of resentment" (multiculturalists, feminists, Marxists, and others). He was educated at Yale University, the University of Cambridge, and Cornell University.