Why McCullers is less read today than her contemporary sisters of the South

Carson McCullers's novella "The Ballad of the Sade Cafe" opens as a classic case of one of the dominant literary motifs: a stranger comes to town. McCuller's starts in the present (of her day, that is, about 1950) in a small Georgia town with a deserted and dilapidated Main Street, probably much like many Midwest prairie towns today, and with one large building that's seen better days and seems to be inhabited by an elderly, ghostly woman who occasionally looks out her window at the nothingness around her but never ventures out into that nothingness. Then we go back and learn her history: she was the wealthiest and oddest person in a town of oddities, miserly, litigious, seemingly asexual - looking very much like a man, and her one relationship with another person was a 10-day marriage. The central story opens with her and some men standing around on her front steps when a figure appears in the distance, approaches, turns out to be a hunchbacked man who claims to be her cousin. The guys think he's after her money, but oddly she shares some drinks, invites him inside, and he's not seen again for a few days. Townsfolk think she's murdered him - but, lo, he appears again and it seems she's taken him on as a what? lover? business partner? relative? And why would she? Is he weirdly hypnotic in his deformity, like Richard III? Or is she perverse in some way? These are questions McCullers will answer. She's obviously yet another one of the great mid-20th century Southern writers, but today she's much less well known that her sisters of the South, Welty and O'Connor. Not sure why that is. Perhaps her political sensibilities were less cautious, less acute - this very promising novella, in its first few pages, is kind of off-putting in its casual racism and even anti-Semitism - maybe accurately depicting the views of the people of the time, but stated so directly that it's hard to dissociate those views from McC. herself, unfair as that may be.