Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

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The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

is Carson McCullers’s first novel, published in 1940 when the author was 22 years old. Gore Vidal notes that it made McCullers “an American legend from the beginning”, though she remains on the fringe of the canon today – beloved by many, but overshadowed by contemporaries such as William Faulkner. Like McCullers’s other novels,

Heart

centers on a diverse group of individuals struggling to survive in a small Southern town. Her most expansive work, it

can be viewed as a treasury of characterizations and themes that McCullers would mine in future writings.

Heart features five protagonists. Most central is John Singer, a white deaf-mute whose object of affection, another male deaf-mute named Antonapoulos, has been banished to a mental hospital. Singer

2778 words

Citation: Seymour, Nicole. "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 22 December 2011 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=623, accessed 28 March 2024.]

623 The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter 3 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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