Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville among them—who projected in fable and with symbol the story of America’s unquiet mind. Against her southern background, she created a world of symbolic violence and tragic reality, indirectly lighted by the cool Flaubertian purity of her style. Of the writers of her generation, none was more consistent or thorough in achieving a sustained body of work.

Several of McCullers’s works received critical acclaim. “A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud,” a short story sometimes compared in theme to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798), was chosen for the O. Henry Memorial Prize in 1942. The dramatic version of The Member of the Wedding was extremely successful, running on Broadway continuously for nearly fifteen months, and it was named for both the Donaldson Award and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1950. In addition, McCullers was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1942 and 1946, and she received an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1943.

Carson McCullers will be remembered primarily as a writer of fiction who experimented, with varying degrees of success, in the genres of drama, poetry, and the essay. She was one of the foremost of the remarkable generation of Southern women writers who, in addition to McCullers, included Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, and Katherine Anne Porter. With her fellow women writers, and with such Southern male writers as William Faulkner, Truman Capote, and Tennessee Williams, McCullers shares an uncanny talent for capturing the grotesque. Her fictional world is peopled with the freaks of society: the physically handicapped, the emotionally disturbed, the alienated, the disenfranchised. This preoccupation with the bizarre earned for her a major place in the literary tradition known as the “southern gothic,” a phrase used to describe the writers mentioned above and others who use gothic techniques and sensibilities in describing the South of the twentieth century.

Few have created a fictional South as successfully as has McCullers in her best fiction. Hers is a small-town South of mills and factories, of barren main streets lined with sad little shops and cafés, of intolerable summer heat and oppressive boredom. In her first and perhaps best novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), she portrays a small Southern town from the points of view of five of its residents: Mick Kelly, the confused adolescent heroine; Doctor Copeland, an embittered black physician whose youthful idealism has been destroyed; Jake Blount, an alcoholic drifter with Marxist leanings; Biff Brannon, the sexually disturbed owner of the café, where much of the novel’s action takes place; and John Singer, the deaf-mute whose kindness, patience, and humanity to the other characters provide the moral center of the novel.

The themes of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter are ones that McCullers never completely abandoned in her subsequent fiction and drama: the loneliness and isolation inherent in the human condition, the impossibility of complete reciprocity in a love relationship, the social injustice of a racially segregated South, and adolescence as a time of horrifying emotional and sexual confusion. In Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941), she explored sexual tension and jealousy among the denizens of a Southern army post. The Member of the Wedding (1946), the novel she later adapted into the successful play of the same title, treats the delicate symbiotic relationship between a lonely adolescent girl, her seven-year-old cousin, and a black domestic. The Ballad of the Sad Café, first published in Harper’s Bazaar in 1943 and later in a collection of McCullers’s short works, is justifiably called one of the finest pieces of short fiction in American literature. It deals with another bizarre triangle, this one involving a masculine, sexually frigid, small-town heiress; her cousin, a hunchback dwarf; and her former husband, a worthless former convict with an old score to settle.

The four works of fiction mentioned above guarantee McCullers a permanent place among American writers of World War II and the postwar era. She also published more than a dozen short stories, most of which are not specifically set in the South. The best of them—“Wunderkind” (1936) and “A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud.” (1942), for example—are proficiently executed exercises that demonstrate the sure control and balance so crucial to McCullers’s longer fiction.

McCullers also wrote critical essays that betray a deep emotional and technical understanding of imaginative literature. Her small body of poetry, heavily influenced by the seventeenth century Metaphysicals, is consistently interesting. After McCullers’s death, her sister, Margarita G. Smith, collected her previously uncollected short fiction, her literary criticism, and her poetry and essays in The Mortgaged Heart (1971).

Carson McCullers’s reputation as a playwright rests solely on the phenomenal success of one play, The Member of the Wedding, which she based on her novel of the same title. Her only other play, The Square Root of Wonderful, was a critical and popular failure and a professional disappointment from which McCullers never quite recovered. The very critics and theatergoers who hailed McCullers as a brilliant innovator in 1950 turned their backs on her in 1958. Flawed and uneven as her theatrical career was, however, McCullers deserves a special place among modern American playwrights, not only for what she achieved but also for what she attempted. With her friend Tennessee Williams, she was one of the first American playwrights to parlay a fragile, moody, nearly static vision of human frailty into solid commercial theater.

No one was more surprised by the success of The Member of the Wedding than McCullers herself. She had seen but a handful of plays in her life when Williams, with whom she was spending the summer of 1946 on Nantucket, suggested that she turn her novel into a play. Excited by the idea of writing in a new and unfamiliar genre and intrigued by Williams’s sense that the novel had strong dramatic possibilities, McCullers spent that June calmly and steadily composing a draft of the play. Across the dining room table from her sat Williams, who was working on Summer and Smoke—it was the only time either of them was able to work with anyone else in the room. Despite Williams’s willingness to help, McCullers steadfastly rejected her friend’s advice, following instead her own creative instincts.

Though all odds were against it, the play was an immediate success when it opened on Broadway in January, 1950. Audiences gave the cast standing ovations, and the critics almost unanimously praised the work’s grace, beauty, and timing. In the spring, The Member of the Wedding won two Donaldson Awards—as the best play of the season and as the best first Broadway play by an author—and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play. McCullers was named Best Playwright of the Year and given a gold medal by the Theatre Club. The Member of the Wedding ran for 501 performances and grossed more than one million dollars on Broadway before enjoying a successful national tour.

This great acclaim, remarkable enough for a more conventional drama, is even more remarkable when one considers that The Member of the Wedding is a “mood play,” dependent on emotion and feeling rather than on a standard plot. All three acts take place on one deliberately confining set, and much of the play’s significant action happens offstage, “between acts,” as it were. Indeed, even while praising the play, reviewers questioned whether it was a genuine drama at all. Like Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (pr. 1944) and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (pr. 1949)—significantly, the only two plays Carson McCullers had seen produced on Broadway before writing her hit—The Member of the Wedding is a play that subordinates plot to characterization, action to the almost poetic accretion of psychic detail. That audiences would even sit through, let alone cheer, such a slow-moving piece of drama was a revelation to the theater world of 1950.

The success of The Member of the Wedding solved McCullers’s chronic financial problems and earned for her a reputation as a gifted and innovative dramatist, but seven years of ill health and personal tragedy ensued before her next play, The Square Root of Wonderful, opened on Broadway in October, 1957. Plagued from the outset by personnel changes and by McCullers’s incompetence at the kind of last-minute rewriting required by the theater, the play failed almost immediately. Neither McCullers nor director Jose Quintero could do anything to save it, and it closed after only forty-five performances. The disaster of The Square Root of Wonderful left McCullers severely depressed, so anxious had she been to repeat the triumph of The Member of the Wedding. Various physical ailments by then made it difficult for her to write at all, and she never again attempted writing for the theater.