The reading of McCullers" work provides the reader with a dynamic intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic experience. Her gifts are manifold, intense and varied. For one thing, she is a masterful portrayer of character as she gives simultaneously the essence of each individual and his idiosyncratic particularities. Her range of as portrayer of character is very wide. Her black men and women never become mere stereotypes moving in the background. Her adolescent figures remain memorable as she treats them with humorous tolerance and sympathetic understanding in their awkwardness, frustration, bitterness, confusion and feelings of isolation. If her ordinary characters are memorable, the oddities of some others arrest, amuse or shock. Such personages function symbolically or metaphorically, as well as realistically. In the few years in which she created her first four novels, her first play and short stories, McCullers built a diverse world and filled it with people possessing great energy and forcefulness. .
Besides her characterization, her artistry lay, to a considerable degree, in the remarkable virtuosity of her language, her blending of the poetic with the prosaic, of the formal with the colloquial, of the mystical and metaphorical perspectives with the details of life in an ordinary small Southern town or a sleepy army post. Her poignant treatment of the tragic as well as her irrepressible humor, her sympathy for an unlovable individual as well as her unabashed confrontation of the cruelty of the powerful ad frustrated indicate the breadth, inclusiveness, and compassion to be found in her work. .
A master of realistic narrative, she could move easily onto the symbolic, allegorical and philosophical dimensions of her art. Her exploitation of the grotesque for dramatic or comic effect or to emphasize the isolation of the human being led her beyond realism to an experimentation of the gothic mode.