Novel
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
Carson McCullers · 1940
Synopsis
In a small Georgia textile town, John Singer, a deaf-mute, loses the companionship of Spiros Antonapoulos, the other deaf-mute with whom he had lived for ten years, whom his cousin has committed to an asylum. Singer takes a room with the Kellys and eats at the New York Café. Four people get into the habit of going up to his room to confide in him: Mick, one of his landlords' daughters, who dreams of composing music, Biff Brannon, owner of the all-night café, Dr Copeland, a Black doctor, and Jake Blount, an agitator who wants to rouse the workers.
Context
In the spring of 1938, the author submitted to Houghton Mifflin the outline and six chapters of a novel entitled The Mute, and obtained a contract, an advance and the firm's fiction fellowship; she had already published a short story in a magazine in 1936. The publisher preferred to the working title a line by the Scottish poet William Sharp, who wrote as Fiona Macleod: “But my heart is a lonely hunter that hunts on a lonely hill”. The book appeared in June 1940 and quickly rose among the bestsellers. Robert Ellis Miller made a film of it in 1968, with Alan Arkin.
Who it is for
A novel in five alternating voices, which the author compared to a fugue. Translated into French by Marie-Madeleine Fayet in 1947, then by Frédérique Nathan in 1993.
Prizes and reception
Noticed on its publication by Richard Wright; seventeenth on the Modern Library's list of the hundred best English-language novels of the century.
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