The Ballad of the Sad Café McCullers, Carson | Virginia Spencer Carr (essay date 1990)
Virginia Spencer Carr (essay date 1990)
SOURCE: "The Ballad of the Sad Café, " in Understanding Carson McCullers, University of South Carolina Press, 1990, pp. 53-71.
[In the following essay, Carr introduces The Ballad of the Sad Café, discussing, among other things, thematic parallels between the novella and McCullers's other fiction, connections between McCullers's life and work, and the critical response to the novella.]
The monotony and boredom that permeated [McCullers's] life with her husband in 1939 before their move from Fayetteville, North Carolina, contributed not only to the completion of Reflections in a Golden Eye, but also to her novella, The Ballad of the Sad Café, published for the first time in 1943 in a single issue of Harper's Bazaar. More important to the story line of the tale than McCullers's southern discomfort, however, was her predicament in New York in 1940 and 1941. She had...
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