L’auteur

Carson McCullers was born at Columbus, Georgia, in 1917. Always a delicate person, as a young adult she began experiencing strokes, and at the age of thirty-one her entire left side was paralysed. For a while she could only use one finger to type, and for years before her death, as her sister informs us, she could not sit at a desk to work. In 1938 she married James Reeves McCullers, a corporal in the U.S. army. The marriage was not a success and they divorced. They continued to keep in touch and subsequently remarried, separating finally in 1953, he later committed suicide.
She was established as a writer by the time she reached her twenties but it was not until she published “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter”, when she was twenty-three, that she won widespread recognition. Her other works include “Reflections in a Golden Eye” (1941), “The Member of the Wedding” (1946, New York Critics Award 1950, staged as a play at the Royal Court Theatrer, London), “The Ballad of the Sad Café” (1951), “The Square Root of Wonderful” (1958), a play, and “Sweet as a Pickle and Clean as a Pig” (1964). She was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1942-43 and in 1946, and also received an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1945. She was also a Fellow of the Academy. She lived in Nyack, New York, until her death in 1967.
Described by V.S. Pritchett as “an incomparable storyteller”, it was some time before she achieved recognition outside the United States. Graham Greene has written of her : “Miss McCullers and perhaps Mr Faulkner are the only writers since the death of D.H. Lawrence with an original poetic sensibility. I prefer Miss McCullers to Mr Faulkner because she writes more clearly ; I prefer her to D.H. Lawrence because she has no message.”
 
Le livre

Dans le cœur du Sud de l’Amérique, J.T. Malone découvre qu’il est mourant.
Soudain, il semble que c’est toute la ville qui est en déclin. Le vieux Juge Clane rêve de la résurrection de la Confédération, pendant que son petit-fils, Jester, est involontairement attiré par Sherman, un versatile orphelin noir qui ressent la vive piqûre de l’injustice raciale, spécialement quand il découvre la vérité à propos de ses origines.

Editions Penguin Book Fiction année 1961, ISBN 0140181318, état général correct, couverture souple, couverture tranche et dos très légèrement marqués, intérieur et tranches des pages légèrement jaunis, livre broché format poche de 12,8x19,5 cm, 208 pages.