Many of McCullers' other significant works are collected in one volume, called The Collected Stories of Carson McCullers, Including The Member of the Wedding and The Ballad of the Sad Cafe. The latest reissue is from Mariner Books in 1998.

Truman Capote was a friend of McCullers', and many of the characters in his works seem as though they would fit perfectly into her books. One collection that particularly resembles hers is The Grass Harp,, reissued in 1993 by Vintage Books. Included in this volume is his acclaimed novella A Tree of Night.

Flannery O'Connor once said, "I have found that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic." O'Connor was a Southern woman writer in the 1950s and...