SOURCE: "The Ballad of the Sad Café," in Understanding Carson McCullers, University of South Carolina Press, 1990, pp. 53-69.

In the following essay, Carr discusses events in McCullers' personal life that were incorporated into The Ballad of the Sad Café. The love-triangle between the characters of Amelia Evans, the hunchback Lymon, and Macy grew out of relationships in McCullers's life, according to Carr.

The monotony and boredom that permeated the author's life with her husband in 1939 before their move from Fayetteville, North Carolina, contributed not only to the completion of Reflections in a Golden Eye, but also to her novella, The Ballad of the Sad Café, published for the first time in 1943 in a single issue of Harper's Bazaar. More important to the story line of the tale than McCullers's southern discomfort, however, was her predicament in New York in 1940 and 1941. She had hoped for a committed relationship with...