In the following excerpt, Cook gives a short overview of McCullers's "Wunderkind," and discusses the author's "gift for recapturing the intense but diffuse feelings of children at critical moments in their growing up."

Most of the sketches written as assignments during 1935 and 1936 are little more than exercises. Their interest for the reader, if any, comes from seeing her work out various technical problems while finding the true bent of her talent. But in the summer of 1936 she wrote a story entitled "Wunderkind," which so impressed her teacher, Whit Burnett, that he decided to publish it in the prestigious magazine Story, which he edited. It was her first published piece, and ever afterward Carson McCullers was to declare her occupation as "writer."

An obviously autobiographical story, "Wunderkind" describes a fifteen-year-old girl's discovery during a music lesson that she is not the prodigy she had thought and hoped she...