The Heart is a Lonely Hunter introduced Carson McCullers as both a major literary talent and as a bestselling author. A troubled soul who could translate heartbreak and despair into beautiful prose, McCullers’s novels and stories established her as one of the great writers of the American South.

Biography

Carson McCullers, novelist, short story writer, and playwright, was born Lula Carson Smith on February 19, 1917, in Columbus, Georgia, the daughter of Lamar Smith, a jewelry storeowner, and Vera Marguerite Waters. Best known for her novels The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, The Ballad of the Sad Café, Reflections in a Golden Eye, and The Member of the Wedding, McCullers also won awards for her adaptation of The Member of the Wedding for the Broadway stage. After completing high school, Carson studied for two years in New York before marrying James Reeves McCullers and moving to New York permanently upon the publication of her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, in 1940 when McCullers was only 23. Heralded as a wunderkind by critics, McCullers' most significant was published between 1943 and 1950. Plagued by a series of strokes attributed to a mis-diagnosed and untreated case of childhood rheumatic fever, McCullers died at age fifty in 1967. With a collection of work including five novels, two plays, twenty short stories, over two dozen nonfiction pieces, a book of children's verses, a small number of poems, and an unfinished autobiography, McCullers is considered among the most significant American writers of the twentieth-century.

When The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was published in 1940, Carson McCullers was instantly recognized as one of the most promising writers of her generation. The novels that followed established her as a master of Southern Gothic.

"McCullers' gift," writes Joyce Carol Oates, "was to evoke, through an accumulation of images and musically repeated phrases, the singularity of experience, not to pass judgment on it." McCullers effortlessly conveyed the raw anguish of her characters and the weird beauty of their perceptions. Set in small Georgia towns that are at once precisely observed and mythically resonant, McCullers' novels explore the strange, sometimes grotesque inner lives of characters who are often marginal and misunderstood. Above all, McCullers possessed an unmatched ability to capture the bewilderment and fragile wonder of adolescence.

In The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, an enigmatic deaf-mute draws out the haunted confessions of an itinerant worker, a young girl, a black doctor, and the widowed owner of a small-town café. Two shorter works, Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941) and The Ballad of the Sad Café (1943), use melodramatic scenarios and freakish characters to explore the disfiguring violence of desire. The Member of the Wedding (1946), on which the play and film were based, tells of a young girl's fascination with her brother's wedding and is perhaps McCullers' most moving and accomplished novel. In Clock Without Hands (1960), the story of a terminally ill druggist, McCullers produces some of her most forceful and indignant social criticism.