With Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, and Katherine Anne Porter, Carson McCullers is an explorer of the Southern grotesque, for the ambiance of her fiction is always Southern, whatever its geographic locale, and her characters are the solitary, the freakish, and the lonely. Her work is distinguished from her fellow regionalists' work in the grotesque genre, however, by a compassion for the disaffiliate so deep that she is his foremost spokesman in modern American literature. Indeed, she has transcended not only regionalism but Americanism as well and has become a spokesman for all the lonely and alienated people of the world. Her best work is tenderly lyrical rather than philosophical, but it merits a distinguished place in that eccentric, bleakly poetic body of Southern fiction that takes as its subject the dark corners of the mind.

McCullers ' mother, Marguerite Smith, was clearly the dominant influence in her life...