The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is the first novel by the American writer Carson McCullers, published in 1940 when she was twenty-three.

It is set in a mill town in Georgia in the 1930s, and its centre is John Singer, a deaf man whose habit of watching other people's mouths makes him the town's ideal listener. Because he cannot answer, the four people who come to his room can hear whatever they need to hear: Mick Kelly, a girl who wants a piano and a life beyond the house her family rents out; Jake Blount, a drunk who has read his way into a theory about how working people are kept poor; Biff Brannon, who runs the all-night diner and notices everything; and Dr Copeland, a black physician whose plan for his children has not survived the town they live in. The novel gives each of them a section and lets their ambitions fail in different ways, while Singer's own grief for his friend continues in the background. McCullers wrote in a Southern Gothic register and the book was read both as a realist account of class and race in the American South and as a parable about isolation under political pressure. Its title is taken from a poem by the Scottish writer William Sharp, who published it as Fiona MacLeod, in which a heart hunts alone on a lonely hill.