The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (Modern Library 100 Best Novels)

Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is the author’s first in her string of works that lift the voices of the outsiders. The debut novel tells the story of a deaf-mute man named John Singer, who lives in an unnamed mill town in Georgia in the late 1930s. Left alone after his close friend and roommate is sent away, Singer moves into a boarding house and soon becomes the confidant of four of the town’s mistfits. His new acquaintances include Mick Kelly, a spirited young girl from a poor family; Jake Blount, an alcoholic social reformer; Dr. Benedict Mady Copeland, an idealistic black physician; and Biff Brannon, the childless owner of the local café that brought the group together. These five voices share a common cry of isolation, the novel’s principal theme. Thus, some understand the characters experiencing this shared isolation to be grotesque, a Southern Gothic literary term for elements — often exaggerated — in dissension of social and cultural formations. However, others argue that the work is far too rooted in realism to fit the aforementioned bill. Having quickly risen to the top of the bestseller lists in 1940, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter was a literary sensation. Modern Library ranked the novel seventeenth on its list of the “100 Best” English-language novels of the 20th century. It was also included in TIME’s “100 Best Novels” (since 1923 to 2005). A film adaptation was made in 1968, starring Alan Arkin, Sondra Locke, and Cicely Tyson. In March 2005, a stage adaptation premiered at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, Georgia and began touring shortly thereafter, commissioned and produced by the Acting Company of New York City. And after being selected for Oprah’s Book Club in 2004, Houghton Mifflin, McCullers's publisher throughout her life, rushed out 700,000 copies of a new paperback edition. As a result, the 64-year-old novel was the No. 1 bestseller for a brief time in May of that year.

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