When he found out the story was dedicated to him, Diamond returned the sentiment by setting music to McCullers’ poem “The Twisted Trinity.” I didn’t know any of this when I read The Ballad of the Sad Café, but I find it pertinent now. This particular story was originally dedicated to a composer named David Diamond, the best friend of McCullers and her husband James Reeves McCullers, Jr. While McCullers was working on this piece, Reeves abandoned her to commence a love affair with Diamond. This review concerns the title novella only, which I read in The Library of America’s Carson McCullers: Complete Novels (a helpful volume as I intend to read all of McCullers’ novels. The Ballad of the Sad Café was originally published as a novella packaged with six short stories. I’m thrilled to keep this week’s theme all about loneliness, cafés, and loss, but let’s move from the stony streets of 1950s Paris to a “miserable main street only a hundred yards long” in the American south. The Ballad of the Sad Café by Carson McCullers The Library of America: Complete Novels (2001) Originally published in 1951 pp
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