When Carson McCullers was a teenager, she came to New York City to study piano at Juilliard. She never matriculated; she lost the purse with her tuition money in it. Such small, unredressed tragedies as these are at the silent, solitary heart of McCullers\' first novel, which centers on a deaf-mute and a teenage tomboy living in a small Georgia town in the 1930s. McCullers\' characters reach out to one another for sympathy and understanding, but not all of them can complete the connection, and the