In the following essay, Phillips discusses how McCullers' works fit into the genre of the modern Gothic novel.

In the following essay, Carr discusses events in McCullers' personal life that were incorporated into The Ballad of the Sad Café. The love-triangle between the characters of Amelia Evans, the hunchback Lymon, and Macy grew out of relationships in McCullers's life, according to Carr.

[Carson McCullers] is governed by the aesthetics of the primitive. This means that her overview is essentially anti-realistic. She has cut herself off from the world of ordinary experience and ordinary human beings who might entertain ordinary ideas. Her people are bizarre, freakish, lonely, hermaphroditic. This aesthetic dictates an intense concentration on man's most urgent emotional needs: a communion of dialogue and love. For her, further, the truth of the fable is the truth of the heart. It is n...

There is a peculiar quality of isolation about Carson McCullers's work … that owes some of its intensity perhaps to her own status vis-à-vis the South. She does not belong to the great generation of the "renaissance," that is clear enough…. But she does not really belong to the new wave of Southern writers either, since apart from Clock Without Hands—a book dealing, among other things, with the issue of desegregation, which was not published until 1961—...

McCullers images the artist as a screen on which is projected a series of emerging and expanding stills whose flickering breaks dislocate the continuity of causality; or because the artist sees and is seen, he is the eye of a golden bird as well as the observer of the reflections of that golden eye. Such a state is tyrannically relationless and unwilled, for nothing is translated or translatable into anything except itself. Things tenaciously remain things, feelings, feelings; and nothing is symbolic of any...

Together with such other writers as Katherine Anne Porter and Eudora Welty, Mrs. McCullers forms a Southern triad that has carried on and modified the basic Faulknerian themes of lust, disease, mutilation, defeat, idiocy and death. All of these notes, with a shift in emphasis, are played in her fiction over and again: disease crops up in the form of permanent distortion in the figures of the cretin, the crippled and the incurable; the theme of death is effectively pitted against that of adolescence; the ide...

[Few writers] are as consistent and thoroughgoing as Carson McCullers in creating a sustained body of work. This underlying unity is partly the result of her prevailing theme of loneliness and desire, partly the working of the special sensibility which colors her perception of people and events. Her writing has both center and substance…. (p. 1) [Even] though Mrs. McCullers' purpose was frequently misread, there was never any doubt as to the vividness of her writing. She possessed from the fir...

[If we take Carson McCullers] at her word, and I believe we should, [the] theme of spiritual isolation is the cornerstone to her house of fiction. One of the smallest rooms of that house is the region of her short stories [published in The Mortgaged Heart and The Ballad of the Sad Cafe]…. Certainly all are typical McCullers, with this exception: they are all less likely to be labeled "Gothic" or "grotesque" when compared to her novels. For whatever reason, there is less ph...

All outward experience of the characters of Clock Without Hands … is conditioned by a sense of moral isolation, a feeling of despair, and baffled search for an identifiable Self. (p. 15) Mrs. McCullers is most herself as the novelist of inward experience, but in Clock Without Hands she attempts to add another dimension by making her characters stand for the whole South. It is a mistake. The private and the symbolic roles are not fused; the individual and the representative do not merge. The result fo...

The use of the bizarre theory of love offered by the narrator of [Ballad of the Sad Café] as a formula for interpreting all of McCullers' fiction has hampered analysis not only of the novella itself but of her other works as well. The description of her narrative as a ballad, so obviously presented in the title, provides a key to understanding which unlocks the novella's difficulties of literary mode, point-of-view, characterization, and plot structure. (p. 329) McCullers' ballad...

In the preface to the published version of her play The Square Root of Wonderful (1958), the late Carson McCullers posed and answered a question that every writer has come to terms with sooner or later: Why does anyone write at all? I suppose a writer writes out of some inward compulsion to transform his own experience (much of it is unconscious) into the universal and symbolical. The themes the artist chooses are always deeply personal. I suppose my central theme is the theme of spiritual isol...

Spiritual isolation is the basis of most of my themes. My first book was concerned with this, almost entirely, and all of my books since, in one way or another. Love, and especially love of a person who is incapable of returning or receiving it, is at the heart of my selection of grotesque figures to write about—people whose physical incapacity is a symbol of their spiritual incapacity to love or receive love—their spiritual isolation. To understand a work, it is important for the artist to be...

[The Square Root of Wonderful] is to a large extent autobiographical. When it appeared in book form, the author explained in her preface: In The Square Root of Wonderful I recognize many of the compulsions that made me write this play. My husband wanted to be a writer and his failure in that was one of the disappointments that led to his death. When I started The Square Root of Wonderful my mother was very ill and after a few months she died. I wanted to recreate my mother—to remember he...

Miss Carson McCullers [is] the most remarkable novelist, I think, to come out of America for a generation. Coverage is ignored by her. She is a regional writer from the South, but behind her lies that classical and melancholy authority, that indifference to shock, which seem more European than American. She knows her own original, fearless and compassionate mind. The short novels and two or three stories now published in The Ballad of the Sad Café—the singsong Poe-like title so filled with the...

[Clock Without Hands] probes intensely the human spirit, yet captures indelibly the sights and the sounds, the sorrow and the tensions of the South [Mrs. McCullers] knows so well. Incisively exploring the minds and the motivations, the yearnings and dreams of the young, it at the same time conveys the longing and frustration, the sense of intruding death, of the old…. [Mrs. McCullers'] talent, the dreamlike—almost trancelike—quality of her fiction seemingly precludes her ever bei...

The limits of McCullers's accomplishments are real. One reads through her works with a sharp sense of the highly individual, almost eccentric nature of her achievement, but also with a growing sense of their author's restricted range of interest and abilities. And when one looks closely at the whole course of her career, one is even more struck by its disappointments and unfulfilled promises. For there is something initially inspiring but eventually dispiriting about McCullers's life as...

When one reads the novella [The Ballad of the Sad Café] in the understanding that the narrator is a character in the story, he notices a subtle but significant shift in the story's form and subsequent themes. Such a reader finds himself absorbed not so much with the bizarre goings-on in the old café as with the changing perceptions of a person in the process of intense introspection…. The first clue to the actual point of view is the fact that the story begins and ends in the pre...

To all appearances Carson McCullers belongs to a School, the Gothic School of Southern writers unconsciously established by William Faulkner, a school supposedly concerned with the grotesque and the abnormal, with an outlandish love for the morbid, conveniently provided with characters of the decadent aristocracy and depraved poor whites which supposedly make up the population of the South. But whereas other Southern writers, perhaps Eudora Welty and Truman Capote, seem often to have capitalized upon intere...

Here in one omnibus volume ["The Ballad of the Sad Café"], which includes her three novels, a half dozen short stories, and an unfamiliar longer one which gives the volume its name, is the whole fabulous world of Carson McCullers: the dwarfed and the deformed, the hurt and the lonely, the defeated and the despised, the violent and the homicidal—all the masks and symbols which she has employed over a decade of writing to shock the reader into a shared experience of her own intense...

[For] me not a word could be added or taken away from this marvel of a novel ["Clock Without Hands"] by Carson McCullers. Her talent is extraordinary: the name of her first book "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter" might be a description of it: the steady life-giving beat that is the core of every book: the pursuit of the quarry she sees and would catch and hold for us, often something so fleeting and ephemeral that most authors would quail at trying to catch it in words—and Mrs...

The art of Carson McCullers has been called "Gothic." Perhaps it is—superficially. Certainly her day-to-day world, her little Southern towns, are haunted by far more masterful horrors than were ever conjured up in the dreary castles of a Horace Walpole. It seems to me, however, that the "Gothic" label misses the essential point. Because Carson McCullers is ultimately the artist functioning at the very loftiest symbolic level, and if one must look for labels I should prefer...

Carson McCullers has frequently employed mythic patterns to explicate the psychological tensions urging her characters…. The people in her books, stripped of all irrelevant behavioral flesh, present the heart's core of action that we also see played out for us in legend, fairytale, and folk-story. Yet her books—such as Reflections in a Golden Eye, Clock Without Hands, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter—are contemporary reports of life in America…. As a novelist one of her gifts ...

When a writer dies leaving early work uncollected, it is often uncollected for a very good reason; and readers who come to The Mortgaged Heart without previous exposure to Carson McCullers may wonder whether her reputation is justified. This posthumous collection contains 14 stories …, an outline for The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, some nonfiction magazine pieces, and five poems. The stories are clearly apprentice works, some of them from the "How I Grew Up Last Summer" school. They use t...

In a sense [The Mortgaged Heart] is a writer's dream—to have everything one ever wrote, including a rough outline for a novel, published. What more could an artist hope for? On the other hand, for a perfectionist like Carson McCullers, who rewrote over and over again until the gem was sufficiently polished, it might have been a horror…. [As] a specialized collection, it will prove a valuable appendage to devotees of the author's major works…. Her dramatic sense of detail w...