Author | Carson McCullers |
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Language | English |
Publisher | Houghton Mifflin |
Publication date | 1940 |
Publication place | United States |
Media type | Print (hardcover) |
Pages | 356 pp |
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940) is the debut novel by the American author Carson McCullers; she was 23 at the time of publication. It is about a deaf man named John Singer and the people he encounters in a 1930s mill town in the US state of Georgia.
A. S. Knowles Jr., author of "Six Bronze Petals and Two Red: Carson McCullers in the Forties", wrote that the book "still seems to capture [the author's] total sensibility more completely than her other works."[1] Frederic I. Carpenter wrote in the English Journal that the novel "essentially [...] described the struggle of all these lonely people to come to terms with their world, to become members of their society, to find human love—in short, to become mature."[2]