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    A Study Guide for Carson McCullers's "Wunderkind"
    A Study Guide for Carson McCullers's "Wunderkind"
    A Study Guide for Carson McCullers's "Wunderkind"
    Ebook52 pages39 minutes

    A Study Guide for Carson McCullers's "Wunderkind"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Carson McCullers's "Wunderkind," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJul 6, 2016
    ISBN9781535843379
    A Study Guide for Carson McCullers's "Wunderkind"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Carson McCullers's "Wunderkind" - Gale

      2

      Wunderkind

      Carson McCullers

      1936

      Introduction

      Written in 1936, when Carson McCullers was 19 years old, Wunderkind was McCullers’s first published work. It presents the story of Frances, a teenage girl who has been considered a musical prodigy but who, after years of training and sacrifice, seems suddenly incapable of fulfilling the bright expectations she has always held. In the brief space of a single piano lesson, we see her struggling to recover the confidence and artistry she once knew and trying to navigate a flood of conflicting emotions and desires that threaten to overwhelm her. Often praised as a sensitive, insightful portrayal of the pressures and isolation of adolescence, it is marked by a dramatic tension that increases relentlessly throughout the story—despite the fact that very little action occurs. That action takes place in the studio of her music teacher, but the story’s actual setting is the intimate depths of Frances’s troubled mind.

      While teenagers and their problems are a common focus in fiction, relatively few coming-of-age stories were written while their authors were still teenagers themselves. Critical analysis of Wunderkind usually stresses its many autobiographical elements: McCullers had trained as a classical pianist for most of her own childhood and suddenly gave up her ambitions for a musical career after an emotional break in her relationship with a beloved piano teacher. Yet there are also intriguing differences between Frances’s experience and that of her author, and while its details are specific to a world of passionate artistry and intense pressures that few of us ever know, McCullers’s vivid writing seems to evoke universal human feelings and dilemmas. As a result, readers of all ages, and vastly different experience, have been able to recognize themselves in this troubled young musician.

      Author Biography

      Born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1917, young Lula Carson Smith studied for years as a concert pianist, practicing five hours a day. Like the character Frances in Wunderkind (her first published story), she was devastated as a teenager by the realization that she would be unable to fulfill her high ambitions and expectations for a musical career. However, she soon transferred her energies to another artistic calling, and by the age of 23 had become a bestselling and critically acclaimed writer. Despite a troubled marriage and a series of disabling strokes that would cut her life short at age 50, Carson McCullers produced a body of work that has made her one of the most-admired writers of her generation, and one of the most enduring authors of the American Southern literary tradition.

      Her childhood musical ambitions are particularly significant in regard to this story, which critics routinely classify as being obviously autobiographical. Born into comfortable surroundings, young Carson was encouraged to develop her talents. From the age of six, when she first expressed an interest, her parents provided her with a fine piano and the best available instructors. Unlike Mr. Bilderbach in Wunderkind, the author’s musical mentor was a woman, Mary Tucker. When the former concert pianist moved to Columbus, Carson became her only pupil. McCullers studied with Tucker for four years, forming a close bond with her teacher. At fifteen, she experienced the first of her many health problems, a case of rheumatic fever that required several weeks of recovery in a sanitarium. By her own account (in an autobiographical sketch submitted to Story for the publication of Wunderkind when she was 19), it was at this point that she "began to question whether she had the necessary physical stamina and the talent to be the concert pianist she fiercely held as

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