The wonder of Carson McCullers’s writing is in its exquisite, oddly familiar strangeness. She writes of Mick Kelly, the small-town adolescent in her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, " Her face felt like it was scattered in pieces and she could not keep it straight, " and of the embittered recluse Amelia, the heroine of The Ballad of the Sad Café, " It is a face like the terrible dim faces known in dreams — sexless and white, with two gray crossed eyes which are turned inward so sharply that they seem to be exchanging with each other one long and secret gaze of grief. " Of Frankie Addams, the protagonist of McCullers’s masterpiece, The Member of the Wedding, who’s stranded between a still comforting childishness and new feelings of impinging adulthood that pierce and confuse her (Mick in the earlier book is a blueprint for her), McCullers says, " The name for what had happened to her Frankie did not know, but she could feel her squeezed heart beating against the table edge. "

The voice in these passages is wild yet precise, delicate yet potent, fearlessly poetic. You can hear its echoes in Tennessee Williams, who adored her, and — without its amazing lyrical control — in the early one-acts of Edward Albee, especially The Zoo Story, where one long, aria-like monologue (the " Jerry and the dog " speech) is clearly inspired by McCullers’s short story " A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud. " Occasionally that voice evokes Thornton Wilder (in Frankie’s desperate astonishment at the passing of time, which might have been written for Our Town) or William Saroyan (the atmosphere of Biff’s Brannon’s New York Café in Lonely Hunter suggests, in a smaller way, that of the San Francisco Wharf dive in Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life). These are playwrights who did their best work during the year or two before McCullers published Lonely Hunter. And there are slivers of Elizabeth Bishop in Frankie’s musings on the mysteries of identity and perception. Like the little girl in Bishop’s poem " In the Waiting Room " who experiences an epiphany as she recognizes the distance between her life and that of the African women in National Geographic photographs, McCullers’s young heroine, the portrait of the artist as a restless not-quite-teenager, asks the black housekeeper Berenice, her surrogate mother, " Doesn’t it strike you as strange that I am I, and you are you? . . . And we can look at each other, and touch each other, and stay together year in and year out in the same room. Yet always I am I, and you are you. And I can’t ever be anything else but me, and you can’t ever be anything else but you. Have you ever thought of that? And does it seem to you strange? "

McCullers lived to be just 50, and she wrote only five novels, two of them (Reflections in a Golden Eye and The Ballad of the Sad Café) really the length of novellas; they’re all reprinted in the elegant new Library of America volume that came out last month. She also wrote some stories and two plays — a 1950 dramatization of The Member of the Wedding that is, along with the best of Williams and O’Neill and Our Town, one of the masterpieces of the American theater, and, eight years later, a failed attempt called The Square Root of Wonderful. She fell into depression after Square Root closed and wrote only one more book before she died, Clock Without Hands, the only McCullers novel that I find flat and uninteresting. But her output doesn’t seem so small when you realize that she turned out Lonely Hunter, Reflections, Sad Café, and both the novel and the play versions of The Member of the Wedding in just over a decade. Like other gifted American writers, she did her finest work in a volcanic burst early in her career and then flamed out, and I suspect that’s one reason — along with her idiosyncratic style, which both belongs in the category of Southern Gothic (all her work is set in her native Georgia) and seems somehow to elude it — that may account for her relative obscurity over the past couple of decades.

For a while the movies kept her alive. In the late ’60s there were film versions of Reflections in a Golden Eye (a memorable one by John Huston, with marvelous performances by Marlon Brando, Elizabeth Taylor, Brian Keith, and Julie Harris) and The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (a fairly dreadful one with the single distinction of Alan Arkin’s acting in the lead role). And in those days the extraordinary 1952 Fred Zinnemann movie of The Member of the Wedding, which preserved the stage performances of Julie Harris, Ethel Waters, and Brandon de Wilde, still retained the status of a minor classic. I’m not sure high-school kids even read the book any more, though the college friend who confided that, reading it for the first time, she could only wonder how McCullers knew so much about her emotional life, was, I know, one of many. But McCullers was supplanted by S.E. Hinton and Judy Blume and a subsequent generation of inferior writers of junior fiction. The Library of America collection is sorely needed to restore her faded reputation.

Her great subject is love, of which she writes, in Sad Café, " There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which has lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. " Lover and beloved are often grotesquely mismatched in her books, but the twisted quality of their connection is gentled by McCullers’s passionate empathy, so similar to her friend Tennessee Williams’s, for fragile souls in emotional (and sometimes erotic) anguish.

In Lonely Hunter, a beautiful, stirring, and finally wayward novel (like many debut books, it gets away from its author), most of the characters seek out the deaf-mute Singer and make him the repository for their pained confidences ( " For two days now I been talking to you in my mind because I know you understand the things I want to mean, " one of them says) even as he transforms another mute, a childlike man who can’t think beyond his stomach, into his imagined soulmate, with tragic consequences. " The eyes of his friend were moist and dark, " McCullers writes, " and in them he saw the little rectangled pictures of himself that he had watched a thousand times. " Reflections’ Captain Penderton, who is alienated from his own sexuality, becomes obsessed with a private in his peacetime company, a man who chooses, as the object of his own unexpressed desires, the captain’s wife. Miss Amelia, the café owner in The Ballad of the Sad Café, falls in love with her itinerant cousin, a dwarf, who lives on her generosity until he finds his own beloved — Marvin Macy, an ex-con whose wildness and fury can be traced to his unrequited love for Miss Amelia.

McCullers’s most eloquent lover is Frankie Addams, who falls in love with a wedding — that of her cadet brother and his bride. Feeling a profound sense of un-belonging, she reaches out for the life, throbbing with exciting, barely imaginable possibilities, that she envisions they’re on the verge of embracing. They become, in her poignant phrase, " the we of me, " a solution for the " looseness " she feels in herself and projects onto the wide world. Berenice speaks of the human condition as a state of being caught, " and we try in one way or another to widen ourself free. " But her metaphor arises from an essential groundedness: she’s nestled in her church community and her Christian vision of the world. When Frankie insists, " I mean you walk around and you see all the people. And to me they look loose. . . . Where did all these people come from and what are they going to do? " , Berenice’s patient answer is, " They were born . . . and they going to die. " Berenice is a marvelous character, but it’s Frankie’s wandering spirit and not Berenice’s quiet one that McCullers identifies with. Frankie is her most moving creation, and, pace J.D. Salinger, Frankie’s story is, I believe, the greatest coming-of-age novel ever published in this country.