Heart Is A Lonely Hunter (Paperback)
Staff Reviews
An elegy to the limits of humankind. Through class and race exploration, Carson McCullers weaves this masterpiece between narrators. Each with a unique narrative, readers grow and learn and suffer alongside these characters. Their troubles find their way to the ears of a deaf man, who serves as a receptor for the trials of their lives. As many in this novel are able to change and move forward, many others are not. For an in-depth inspection of the complexity of humanity, consider this novel.
— From Rose's Picks
This is my all-time favorite book. McCullers wrote this when she was just 23 years old in 1940. Described as a Southern Gothic, this magnificent work of literary fiction is brimming with motifs of anti-capitalism, anti-racism, music, and deep, platonic love. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is beautifully written, quaint, relevant, profound, and character-based. It is a story I will revisit many times.
(I'd like to thank local musician, calligrapher, typewriter collector, and jazz aficioinado, Rollie Tussing for first gifting me this book.)
- Clarisse
— From ClarisseThe beloved classic that turned Carson McCullers into an overnight literary sensation and one of the Modern Library's top 20 novels of the 20th century.
“A remarkable book…From the opening page, brilliant in its establishment of mood, character, and suspense, the book takes hold of the reader.”
In a Georgia Mill town during the 1930s, an enigmatic John Singer, draws out the haunted confessions of an itinerant worker, a doctor, a widowed café owner, and a young girl. Each yearns for escape from small town life, but the young girl, Mick Kelly, the book's heroine (loosely based on McCullers), finds solace in her music.
Wonderfully attuned to the spiritual isolation that underlies the human condition, and with a deft sense for racial tensions in the South, McCullers spins a haunting, unforgettable story that gives voice to the rejected, the forgotten, and the mistreated—and, through Mick, gives voice to the quiet, intensely personal search for beauty.
"When one puts [this book] down, it is with . . . a feeling of having been nourished by the truth." --May Sarton
“To me the most impressive aspect of THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER is the astonishing humanity that enables a white writer, for the first time in Southern fiction, to handle Negro characters with as much ease and justice of those of her own race. This cannot be accounted for stylistically or politically; it seems to stem from an attitude toward life.” -- Richard Wright —