Noted literary scholar Harold Bloom and William Golding compiled Carson McCullers (Modern Critical Views) (1986) to provide a wide range of critical viewpoints for students of McCullers's work. In addition to considering her career as a whole, the authors comment on individual works.

In the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), Harper Lee tells the story of eight-year-old Scout and her older brother Jem growing up in the South during the Depression. Their attorney father takes an unpopular stance when he agrees to represent an African-American man accused of raping a poor white woman.

McCullers's critically acclaimed The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940) is the story of John Singer, a deaf-mute living in a southern mill town in the 1930s. The novel explores themes of loneliness, morality, and intolerance as it presents the lives of five characters.

Tennessee Williams's play...