The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
In a sleepy Georgia mill town during the late 1930s, four wildly different people orbit around a single deaf man named John Singer. Mick Kelly is a fierce thirteen-year-old who dreams of writing symphonies in a house that cannot afford a piano. Jake Blount is a drunken, itinerant agitator trying to organize workers who would rather not listen. Dr. Benedict Copeland is a Black physician burning out on the gap between his ambitions for his race and the small, wounded children who come into his clinic. Biff Brannon runs the diner where they all, sooner or later, end up. Each of them speaks to Singer as though he truly understands, unaware of who he is talking to. Carson McCullers published the novel at twenty-three, and it remains one of the great portraits of American loneliness.
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After his deaf-mute friend Antonapoulos is sent to a state hospital, John Singer takes a room in a Georgia mill town and eats every day at the New York Cafe. A teenage girl, a Black doctor, a labor organizer, and the cafe owner each find themselves talking to a man who cannot answer back.
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940) was Carson McCullers's debut novel at age 23. It was selected for Oprah's Book Club in 2004 and is widely considered one of the great Southern American novels of the 20th century.
Yes. A 1968 film adaptation starring Alan Arkin and Sondra Locke was released. Both leads were nominated for Academy Awards. The film follows the novel's structure of multiple intersecting characters in a Georgia mill town.
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was written by Carson McCullers, published in 1940 by Signet.
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is 320 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is a standalone novel by Carson McCullers, not part of a series.
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
