With the publication of her first novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers, all of twenty-three, became a literary sensation. With its profound sense of moral isolation and its compassionate glimpses into its characters' inner lives, the novel is considered McCullers' finest work, an enduring masterpiece first published by Houghton Mifflin in 1940. At its center is the deaf-mute John Singer, who becomes the confidant for various types...

A transient stops at an all-night cafe and explains to the owner and a paperboy how the science of love helped him to recover after his wife left him.

When hearing impaired John Singer moves to a Southern town to continue his friendship with a recently institutionalized fellow deaf mute, his compassion changes the lives of a small circle of struggling people.

Profiles fifteen commonly studied novels by such authors as William Faulkner, Amy Tan, Margaret Atwood, and L. Frank Baum, providing plot summaries, biographical and historical context, examples of criticism, and discussion ofcharacters, themes, and style.

Brando plays Stanley Kowalski to Vivien Leigh's Blanche Du Bois in a study of contrasting characters and value systems--new versus old: modern culture vs. the old South; Caesar returns from a triumphant battle to Rome only to fall into the assassination plot set by Brutus, Cassius, and Casca; a comedy about an interpreter sent to Japan after World War II; Southern Gothic based on an army base in Georgia about a sexually repressed army officer whose...