The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

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."