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 interest created simply by differences and to have delved into strange creatures with artistic and precise surgery, Carson McCullers seems to have been concerned with a larger vision—in which the abnormal figures, it is true, but with a functional purpose, not simply to gain from the instinctive, primitive quickening we have for things strange or perverted. (pp. 53-4)

[It is probably] the tenderness of her seeing, the childlike compassion and interest without...