“Maybe when people longed for a thing that bad, the longing made them trust in anything that might give it to them.” “All we can do is go around telling the truth.” Do not attempt to stand alone …The most fatal thing a man can do is try to stand alone.” None of them is completely educated, and they are all caught in the circumstances of a society which make decent life impossible.”

“This fine and feeling novel … is a picture of life in a Southern mill town of 30,000 inhabitants, and the characters of the story are poor. Here’s an encapsulating quote from one of the countess accolades this novel received: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter made its young author a literary celebrity. “To me the most impressive aspect of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is the astonishing humanity that enables a white writer, for the first time in Southern fiction, to handle African-American characters with as much ease and justice as those of her own race.” Richard Wright, reviewing the novel in 1940, wrote:

No writer in the past twenty years has stated America’s racial dilemma so simply and dramatically. In a sense The Heart is a Lonely Hunter was ahead of its time. A novel of its time and ahead of its time Their appeal to Singer is the appeal of all humanity to a silent, cryptic universe.” Copeland, the African-American patriarch. “The characters move around Singer, a man of mystical understanding, in an intricate dance of hope and despair: Mick, and adolescent ardently longing to express herself in music Jake Blount, a wild, blundering reformer Dr. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is concerned with the struggle of human beings to build bridges of communication between their separate islands of loneliness.

Published when McCullers was only twenty-three, she described herself as “much too young to understand what happened to me or the responsibility it entailed.” Still, it was an epic achievement and a marvel that one so young had such a grasp of human nature. Following is a selection of quotes from The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, a twentieth-century classic. Carson McCullers (1917 – 1967) won numerous literary accolades for her 1940 novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

The lonely hunter book