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 sense of human tragedy. When "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter" was published in 1949, it was widely recognized as an original and mature work, and the acclaim for it was mixed with mild astonishment that the book should be the work of a twenty-three-year old writer. Something like that first astonishment is induced by the present collection, which exhibits what an impressive and unified body of work has been produced by Mrs. McCullers at an age when many another writer has hardly started his career. For "The Ballad of the Sad Café" makes abundantly clear, which was not generally seen at the time of their separate publication, that "Reflections in a Golden Eye" and "The Member of the Wedding" extend and broaden the themes of her first book, as do the shorter pieces, so that each takes its place in an expanding structure in which each part augments and strengthens the rest.

A recurring theme throughout Mrs. McCullers' work—perhaps the central theme—is the human tragedy of the failure of communication between man and man, and the sense of loss and separation and loneliness which accompanies that failure….

In Mrs. McCullers' world of symbols the urgent need to communicate is most often presented in the guise of the physically maimed or deformed, who are at once the favored and the damned. (p. 1)

The establishment of communication, the breaking down of the barriers of a torturing separateness, is the ultimate achievement of Mrs. McCullers' characters….

"The Sojourner" and "A Domestic Dilemma" and "A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud" are, in their various ways, stories of the separateness which may exist in the "we" of man and wife. It is, however, in the title story, "The Ballad of the Sad Café," that Mrs. McCullers' achievement is seen at its most intense. A short novel, or long short story, or novella … it is condensed and disciplined and brilliant writing, which carries the reader along so easily on the wave of the story that he may not at first be aware how completely he has been saturated with symbolism…. Miss Amelia and the hunchback and Marvin Macy, the instrument of the disaster, are a grotesque crew…. Mrs. McCullers' freaks are not to be dismissed: they are Everyman. (p. 13)