The three final, sad stories from Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers's last three stories, written in the 1950s (I think) when she was in her last years, incredibly sad - though the fiction for which she's best known has streaks of darkness, these last three are pieces of misery and failure, painfully and accurately delineated: A Domestic Dilemma, about a wife and mother uprooted from her native South and declining deeply into alcoholism with her husband helplessly standing by, The Haunted Boy about a boy traumatized by his mother's mental illness and suicide attempt, and the last story, Who Has Seen the Wind?, about a failed writer (and husband) getting lost in the miasma of alcohol: the common thread, obviously, is disappointment, abandonment, wasted talent, and the effect of all of the above on the innocent bystanders, spouses but more particularly children (McCullers's greatest strength as a writer is her comprehension of the child's point of view). Obviously there are autobiographical elements in these stories - McCullers's husband was a failed writer, alcoholic, suicide victim - but she also I think sees elements of herself in the ruined characters: I don't know if she was an alcoholic, but she must have been troubled by her early fame and the struggles later in life to produce anything to live up to her early reputation. Apparently she tried to make Wind into a play - she did very well with the dramatic version of Member of the Wedding - and if she had it would have been seen as a precursor to Who's Afraid of Va. Woolf? - but I'm afraid it would have been without the elaborate machinations and surprises of Woolf - just a descent into meanness and depression - better left as a story.