The Ballad of the Sad Café McCullers, Carson | Richard M. Cook (essay date 1975)
Richard M. Cook (essay date 1975)
SOURCE: "The Ballad of the Sad Café," in Carson McCullers, Frederick Unger, 1975, pp. 84-104.
[In the following excerpt, Cook suggests that The Ballad of the Sad Café celebrates the capacity of love to transform a community and is an elegy to the ephemerality of such love.]
After working on drafts of The Member of the Wedding for two years, in the fall of 1943 Carson McCullers interrupted her work, took a trip to Saratoga Springs and in six weeks' time wrote what is now her best-known work, The Ballad of the Sad Café. Like McCullers's other novels, The Ballad of the Sad Café is the story of lonely people falling in love; but it is more than that. It is a celebration of the power of love itself and an elegy on its passing. It is, as the title indicates, a ballad, a short oral tale, transcribed into written prose, that in Frankie's words has a beginning and an end, a...
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