Carson McCullers (1917 – 1967) was an influential American novelist, playwright, and short-story writer renowned for her depictions of the spiritual isolation, identity struggles, and inner lives of outcasts in the American South. Her acclaimed debut novel is The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), published when she was just 23, and tells the story of a deaf-mute man and a diverse group of misfits in a Georgia mill town.
The Ballad of the Sad Café was published in 1951, and… well, it’s not just the cafe that’s said, I’ll tell you that.
The story has a special quality of melancholy that only beautiful prose can give you when applied to ugly things, and this is what it is: the story of an ugly cafe, ugly people, in an ugly town, just briefly touched by a thing we call love for lack of a better word.
Do not approach if you’re already depressed, ‘cause this’ll do the trick even if you happen to be in a cheerful mood.
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