It is hard to believe that twenty-one years have passed since The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, the first novel of Carson McCullers, was published. For those of us who arrived on the scene in the war years, McCullers was the young writer. She was an American legend from the beginning, which is to say that her fame was as much the creation of publicity as of talent. The publicity was the work of those fashion magazines where a dish of black-eyed peas can be made to seem the roe of some rare fish, photographed by Avedon; yet McCullers's dreaming, androgynous face in its ikon elegance subtly confounded the chic of the lingerie ads all about her. For unlike other "legends," her talent was as real as her face. Though she was progenitress to much "Southern writing" (one can name a dozen writers who would not exist in...