Carson McCullers's work was well received in her lifetime by critics and the book-buying public, but the truest measure of her success may be the admiration so often expressed by other writers. Dame Edith Sitwell, for example, has called her "a transcendental writer," combining "a great poet's eye and mind and senses" with "a great prose writer's sense of construction and character." Tennessee Williams once called her the only great talent to appear in America since the 1920s. Since her death in 1967, her work has continued to earn the appreciation of readers, writers, and literary critics.

McCullers's novels deal with many of the same themes that can be found in her first short story, "Wunderkind." Her fiction is usually set in the South, and like Frances, her protagonists often exist in a state of psychological isolation, unable to communicate their strong feelings to others. They often...