Product Description

An absorbing look at the early beginnings of one of America's finest writers, The Mortgaged Heart is an important collection of Carson McCullers's work, including stories, essays, articles, poems, and her writing on writing. These pieces, written mostly before McCullers was nineteen, provide invaluable insight into her life and her gifts and growth as a writer. The collection also contains the working outline of "The Mute," which became her best-selling novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. As new generations of readers continue to discover her work, Carson McCullers's celebrated place in American letters survives more surely than ever. Edited by McCullers's sister and with a new introduction by Joyce Carol Oates, The Mortgaged Heart will be an inspiration to writers young and old.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #508548 in Books
• Published on: 2005-03-08
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .87" h x 5.46" w x 8.30" l, .81 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

About the Author
Carson McCullers was born in Columbus, Georgia. She published her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, at the age of twenty-three. She died in 1967 at the age of fifty.

Margarita G. Smith, a magazine editor and writer, died of heart failure last Friday at St. Vincent's Hospital. She was 60 years old and lived in Manhattan.

Miss Smith was the sister of the late novelist Carson McCullers, and edited a posthumous collection of her work entitled ''The Mortgaged Heart,'' published in 1972. Miss Smith was fiction editor of Mademoiselle magazine from 1943 to 1960 and introduced to its readers the works of many leading writers, including Flannery O'Connor, Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams. She was also editor of ''Forty Best Stories From Mademoiselle,'' published in 1960.

She later served as contributing fiction editor of Redbook magazine and was a lecturer in English at Columbia University. For many years, she was a teacher with the Writers' Workshop at the New School for Social Research.

Miss Smith was a native of Columbus, Ga., and a graduate of the University of Miami. One of her short stories was featured by Mademoiselle and was included in the ''O. Henry Prize Stories of 1943.''