On this day in 1951 Carson McCullers's The Ballad of the Sad Cafe and Other Works was published. Included in this omnibus edition were most of the pieces upon which her reputation now stands: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Reflections in a Golden Eye, The Member of the Wedding, and a handful of short stories. These had all been written over the previous decade, and the critics used the occasion of the omnibus publication to confirm thirty-four-year-old McCullers as one of America's most important contemporary writers, in a rank with
