Wunderkind

Wunderkind

Summary

'A Wunderkind - a Wunderkind a Wunderkind. The syllables would come out rolling in the deep German way, roar against her ears and then fall to a murmur...'

Writing about outcasts, dreamers and misfits in the Deep South, Carson McCullers was acclaimed for her sympathetic depictions of loneliness, the need for understanding and the search for love. These four masterly stories of eccentrics, failed prodigies, injustice and hope, written when she was in her twenties, explore the human condition with humour and pathos.

This book includes Wunderkind, The Jockey, Madame Zilensky and the King of Finland, A Tree, A Rock and A Cloud.

About the author

Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers was born in 1917. She is the critically acclaimed author of several popular novels in the 1940s and '50s, including The Member of the Wedding (1946). Her novels frequently depicted life in small towns of the southeastern United States and were marked by themes of loneliness and spiritual isolation. McCullers suffered from ill health most of her adult life, including a series of strokes that began when she was in her 20s; she died at the age of 50. The Member of the Wedding was dramatized for the stage in the 1950s and filmed in 1952 and 1997. Other films based on her books are Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967, with Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando), The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1968, starring Alan Arkin) and The Ballad of the Sad Café (1991).
Learn More

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more