The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

Carson McCullers

Bantam Books, 1953 - Fiction - 307 pages

When she was only twenty-three, Carson McCullers's first novel created a literary sensation. She was very special, one of America's superlative writers who conjures up a vision of existence as terrible as it is real, who takes us on shattering voyages into the depths of the spiritual isolation that underlies the human condition. This novel is the work of a supreme artist, Carson McCullers's enduring masterpiece. The heroine is the strange young girl, Mick Kelly. The setting is a small Southern town, the cosmos universal and eternal. The characters are the damned, the voiceless, the rejected. Some fight their loneliness with violence and depravity, Some with sex or drink, and some -- like Mick -- with a quiet, intensely personal search for beauty.

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - jolerie - LibraryThing

The most fatal thing a man can do is try to stand alone. Page 302 Set against a small southern town in the United States during 1930s is the story of several people whose lives are commonly linked by ...

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - lkernagh - LibraryThing

There are so many well written reviews already posted by others, so I will just provide my very brief thoughts here. McCullers debut novel - impressive, worldly writing for a young 23 year-old woman ...

Contents

• Section 1: 1
• Section 2: 10
• Section 3: 27

About the author

Carson McCullers was born in Columbus, Georgia, on February 19, 1917. She died at age fifty in Nyack, New York, on September 29, 1967. A promising pianist, she had hoped to enroll at the Juilliard School of Music when she was seventeen, but when she arrived in New York, she attended writing classes at Columbia University instead. In December 1936 her first story, "Wunderkind," was published in "Story" magazine. That winter she began work on "The Mute," which would become her enduring masterpiece, "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter; Issue 3431 of A Bantam book; A Bantam giant; Bantam Books: Literature; Bantam Books: Novel
• Author: Carson McCullers
• Edition: reprint, reissue
• Publisher: Bantam Books, 1953
• ISBN: 0553269631, 9780553269635
• Length: 307 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / General