Reflections in a Golden Eye

"The greatest prose writer that the South produced"-- Tennessee Williams

'\"The novel is a masterpiece . . . as mature and finished as Henry James\'s THE TURN OF THE SCREW.\"'

The greatest prose writer that the South produced

'"The greatest prose writer that the South produced" -- Tennessee Williams'

'"Again [McCullers] shows a sort of subterranean and ageless instinct for probing the hidden in men's hearts and minds."'

“The greatest prose writer that the South produced” -- Tennessee Williams

“Again [McCullers] shows a sort of subterranean and ageless instinct for probing the hidden in mens hearts and minds.”

The New York Herald-Tribune

"The novel is a masterpiece . . . as mature and finished as Henry James's THE TURN OF THE SCREW." Time Magazine

A new trade paperback edition of McCullers' second novel, REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE, immortalized by the 1967 film starring Elizabeth Taylor, Marlon Brando, and John Houston.

Set on a Southern army base in the 1930s, REFLECTIONS tells the story of Captain Penderton, a bisexual whose life is upset by the arrival of Major Langdon, a charming womanizer who has an affair with Penderton's tempestuous and flirtatious wife, Leonora. Upon the novel's publication in 1941, reviewers were unsure of what to make of its relatively scandalous subject matter. But a critic for Time Magazine wrote, "In almost any hands, such material would yield a rank fruitcake of mere arty melodrama. But Carson McCullers tells her tale with simplicity, insight, and a rare gift of phrase." Written during a time when McCullers's own marriage to Reeves was on the brink of collapse, her second novel deals with her trademark themes of alienation and unfulfilled loves.

Carson McCullers (1917-1967) was the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, The Member of the Wedding, Reflections in a Golden Eye, and Clock Without Hands. Born in Columbus, Georgia, on February 19, 1917, she became a promising pianist and enrolled in the Juilliard School of Music in New York when she was seventeen, but lacking money for tuition, she never attended classes. Instead she studied writing at Columbia University, which ultimately led to The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, the novel that made her an overnight literary sensation. On September 29, 1967, at age fifty, she died in Nyack, New York, where she is buried.