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536 pages, ebook
First published January 1, 1987
Much of the author’s best fiction was germinating during her first three years in New York City before she was married, but she made little attempt to publish what she was writing. In 1939, while living with her husband in Fayetteville, North Carolina, McCullers sent “Sucker” and “Court in the West Eighties” to Maxim Lieber, a New York literary agent who agreed to try to market them for her, and both pieces made the rounds quickly from magazine to magazine without success. Lieber’s failure to place “Sucker” worked, eventually, to McCullers’ advantage in that she received $1,500 for its publication in The Saturday Evening Post in 1963 (in contrast to the $25 she received for her first published story, “Wunderkind”).
“I never did say just what I was talking about,” she said finally. “But there’s this. I wonder if you have ever thought about this. Here we are – right now. This very minute. Now. But while we’re talking right now, this minute is passing. And it will never come again. Never in all the world. When it is gone it is gone. No power on earth could bring it back again. It is gone. Have you ever thought about that?”