Carson McCullers was a diverse and multitalented writer who produced two plays and numerous short stories, essays, and poems. But it is her fiction, including The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, The Member of the Wedding, and The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, that established her as a key voice of the 1940s and '50s. Critics have praised her lyrical evocations of the yearning for love, always tempered by a harsh acknowledgment of the futility of the quest. This new edition of full-length critical essays offers illuminating discussions of McCullers's work and its place in the American canon. This latest title in the Bloom's Modern Critical Views series is bolstered by a chronology, a bibliography, notes on the contributors, and an introduction from noted literary scholar Harold Bloom.