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." 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."
I really enjoyed this one. The prose is beautiful, visceral, and ponderous. The characters reflect their time and place, with corresponding moral complexity. It's a tragedy worth experiencing.
Obviously had to read this after I read Jenn Shapland’s memoir, since I’d never read any McCullers, and holy hell is it good. Took me forever because it was so intense that I could only read it in bits.
