From AudioFile
There are many ways to describe this book: heartbreaking, stunning, unforgettable, human. However it is described, McCullers's masterpiece is riveting reading because of its appeal to our sense of morality and the way it touches on race, class, religion, and family. Narrator Cherry Jones is perfect for this work. She has a quirky, natural reading voice that draws us into the novel and the ability to create riveting characters and accents that capture the mood and pacing of the time. Jones inhabits each person we meet, creating a moral center that she uses to complement McCullers's words. These people have real emotions, and they make critical mistakes we can identify with. Together, narrator and author have created a world worth listening to. R.I.G. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


Book Description
When she was only twenty-three, Carson McCullers's first novel created a literary sensation. She was very special, one of America's superlative writers who conjures up a vision of existence as terrible as it is real, who takes us on shattering voyages into the depths of the spiritual isolation that underlies the human condition. This novel is the work of a supreme artist, Carson McCullers's enduring masterpiece. The heroine is the strange young girl, Mick Kelly. The setting is a small Southern town, the cosmos universal and eternal. The characters are the damned, the voiceless, the rejected. Some fight their loneliness with violence and depravity, Some with sex or drink, and some -- like Mick -- with a quiet, intensely personal search for beauty.


From the Paperback edition.


From the Inside Flap
When she was only twenty-three, Carson  McCullers's first novel created a literary sensation. She  was very special, one of America's superlative  writers who conjures up a vision of existence as  terrible as it is real, who takes us on shattering  voyages into the depths of the spiritual isolation  that underlies the human condition. This novel is  the work of a supreme artist, Carson McCullers's  enduring masterpiece. The heroine is the strange  young girl, Mick Kelly. The setting is a small  Southern town, the cosmos universal and eternal.  The characters are the damned, the voiceless, the  rejected. Some fight their loneliness with  violence and depravity, Some with sex or drink, and some  -- like Mick -- with a quiet, intensely personal  search for beauty.


From the Paperback edition.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was published in the spring of 1940, and was immediately a literary sensation. Carson McCullers was only twenty-three years old, had lived in a small southern town for most of her life, and this was her first novel. But she had read widely in Dostoevsky, Gogol, Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Eugene O'Neill, and her knowledge and insight into her characters transcended her real experience.

Mick Kelly, the adolescent at the center of this strange and brooding novel, is very much the girl McCullers had been in Georgia -- passionately musical, and attracted to freaks and outcasts. Mick's spiritual kinship with John Singer, a deaf mute, and with other social misfits, provides a haunting look into the abyss encountered by human beings in their attempts at love.

Years later, McCullers's friend Tennessee Williams wrote that she "owned the heart and the deep understanding of it, but in addition she had that 'tongue of angels' that gave her power to sing of it, to make of it an anthem."

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING