Together with such other writers as Katherine Anne Porter and Eudora Welty, Mrs. McCullers forms a Southern triad that has carried on and modified the basic Faulknerian themes of lust, disease, mutilation, defeat, idiocy and death. All of these notes, with a shift in emphasis, are played in her fiction over and again: disease crops up in the form of permanent distortion in the figures of the cretin, the crippled and the incurable; the theme of death is effectively pitted against that of adolescence; the idea of defeat is narrowed down to personal disillusion resulting from tragic initiation into life or from the failure of a misdirected lifework—it does not carry the historical implications as in Faulkner's concept of the past bearing down heavily upon the present; mutilation is the fate of the social underdog, the Negro, in the fangs of unjust justice; idiocy is used rather...