Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe

Nicole Seymour (University of Arkansas at Little Rock)

Ed. by Stephen E. Meats, Pittsburg State University
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Sofia Ahlberg (Uppsala University), Patrick Chura (University of Akron), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1951

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novella

Resources

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Carson McCullers initially published

The Ballad of the Sad Café

Harper’s Bazaar

magazine in August 1943. It was collected in 1951 as a novella, alongside several other short stories.

Though a unique work in its own right, Ballad can be linked back to McCullers’s 1940 debut novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, which introduced several concerns that she would pursue in a more concentrated manner in future works. For instance, whereas her 1946 novel The Member of the Wedding takes as its core the tomboy subplot found in Heart, Ballad prominentlytakes up Heart’s concerns with the white working class. Ballad is also notable, among other things, for its allegorical nature and its ambiguous narrative voice – which alternately withholds information from the reader and directly engages

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3826 words

Citation: Seymour, Nicole. "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 07 July 2012 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=1517, accessed 26 November 2024.]

Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe

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