This image is the cover for the book Mortgaged Heart

Mortgaged Heart

“Essential reading for any serious beginning writer . . . illuminating.” —San Francisco Chronicle

Carson McCullers is renowned for her Southern Gothic fiction and for such modern classics as The Member of the Wedding. This collection includes an assortment of her earliest work, written mostly before she was nineteen.

Included are stories, essays, articles, poems, and writing about writing—including the working outline of “The Mute,” which would become her bestselling novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter—as well as an introduction by Joyce Carol Oates. As new generations continue to discover the work of Carson McCullers, this volume provides both an enjoyable read and an inspiring look at the beginning of a brilliant literary career.

Margarita G. Smith, Carson McCullers, Joyce Carol Oates

Carson McCullers (1917–1967) was the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, The Member of the Wedding, Reflections in a Golden Eye, and Clock Without Hands. Born in Columbus, Georgia, on February 19, 1917, she became a promising pianist and enrolled in the Juilliard School of Music in New York when she was seventeen, but lacking money for tuition, she never attended classes. Instead, she studied writing at Columbia University, which ultimately led to The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, the novel that made her an overnight literary sensation. On September 29, 1967, at age fifty, she died in Nyack, New York, where she is buried.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (www.hmhco.com)