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Carson McCullers
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Heart Is A Lonely Hunter: A Novel Kindle Edition

by Carson McCullers (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 5,039 ratings
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The beloved classic that turned Carson McCullers into an overnight literary sensation and one of the Modern Library's top 20 novels of the 20th century.

“A remarkable book…From the opening page, brilliant in its establishment of mood, character, and suspense, the book takes hold of the reader.”

In a Georgia Mill town during the 1930s, an enigmatic John Singer, draws out the haunted confessions of an itinerant worker, a doctor, a widowed café owner, and a young girl. Each yearns for escape from small town life, but the young girl, Mick Kelly, the book's heroine (loosely based on McCullers), finds solace in her music.

Wonderfully attuned to the spiritual isolation that underlies the human condition, and with a deft sense for racial tensions in the South, McCullers spins a haunting, unforgettable story that gives voice to the rejected, the forgotten, and the mistreated—and, through Mick, gives voice to the quiet, intensely personal search for beauty.
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  1. Print length
    150 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Sticky notes
    On Kindle Scribe
  4. Publisher
    Mariner Books
  5. Publication date
    January 25, 2011
  6. Reading age
    14 years and up
  7. File size
    2799 KB
  8. Page Flip
    Enabled
  9. Word Wise
    Enabled
  10. Enhanced typesetting
    Enabled
  11. See all details
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From the Publisher

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9780395929735 image 9780618492398 image 9780618565863 image 9780395925058 image 9780618084753 image 9780618057054 image
Clock Without Hands The Member of the Wedding The Ballad of the Sad Cafe Collected Stories of Carson McCullers Reflections in a Golden Eye The Mortgaged Heart
Customer Reviews
4.2 out of 5 stars
646
4.0 out of 5 stars
971
4.2 out of 5 stars
866
4.5 out of 5 stars
168
4.1 out of 5 stars
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4.4 out of 5 stars
29
Price $14.99 $11.29 $10.49 $18.99 $10.79 $18.99

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00Z9N882U
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Mariner Books; 1st Mariner Books Ed edition (January 25, 2011)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ January 25, 2011
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 2799 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 150 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 5,039 ratings

About the author

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Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers

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Carson McCullers (1917-1967) was the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, The Member of the Wedding, Reflections in a Golden Eye, and Clock Without Hands. Born in Columbus, Georgia, on February 19, 1917, she became a promising pianist and enrolled in the Juilliard School of Music in New York when she was seventeen, but lacking money for tuition, she never attended classes. Instead she studied writing at Columbia University, which ultimately led to The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, the novel that made her an overnight literary sensation. On September 29, 1967, at age fifty, she died in Nyack, New York, where she is buried.

Customer reviews

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Top reviews from the United States

Maria F. Roca
5.0 out of 5 stars Still Powerful and Timely
Reviewed in the United States on April 7, 2024
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I first read this book more than 50 years ago and still in high school. Having just reread it, I am struck once again by the power of this story. The themes are both timely and universal. It is thoughtful and thought provoking. It left me with many important questions about life to ponder.
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Mark Clegg
5.0 out of 5 stars Taboo Subject Matters Tackled in the Pre-War South
Reviewed in the United States on April 18, 2024
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The subjects matters tackled in this book — racism in the Deep South, the role of women, latent homosexuality, pre-marital (and barely teen GASP!) sex — have to be viewed through the prism of pre-War America, so from that standpoint, the book was well ahead of its time. Couple that with the distant drumbeat of the rise of fascism in Europe (the book ends on a radio announcement of Hitler threatening to move on Danzig in August of 1939) and there is a rich, fetid background for a story.

The focal point, the glue that holds the main characters together is a deaf mute named Singer. Since Singer can only communicate through written notes, which he hands out sparingly, he becomes to the other four main characters, an empty vessel that they feel fill with the virtues — but none of the they faults —which they themselves think that they embody. He becomes, depending on the character, a fellow soldier in the fight against racial prejudice, a father confessor, and, most importantly, a silent advocate for their talents and ambitions. The centrality of Singer and his role as almost a Christ-figure only becomes apparent to the other characters at the end (that is as close as I will come to a plot spoiler).

The choking grime, stink, and oppressive poverty and humidity of a southern milltown (Columbus, Ga.) in the 1930's is the perfect backdrop, as each character, in his or her own way, strives for meaning in a hopeless world.
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Shellbrook King
4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent read
Reviewed in the United States on August 12, 2023
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Well worth its standing as one of the best in the canon.
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Maree LaRue
3.0 out of 5 stars Old-fashioned writing of dreary townspeople
Reviewed in the United States on April 29, 2022
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I read this for book club and only struggled halfway through before the meeting, when the ending was spoiled. I pushed myself to finish it, reading a chapter each sitting. Took me nearly two months, but I got resolution.

One star is purely for the author's accomplishment at such a young age. That's very impressive and I'll always be a bit jealous. Another star for a very lived-in and well realized world. I felt the grime and sweat and poverty keenly. And while it took me a long time, this book was still much shorter than most novels...but I still think it would've fared better as a short story. Like Ethan Frome.

I felt like Singer, the deaf-mute "protagonist", was used by the people around him. In much the same way that stories had the wise black character or a sweet damsel. Singer was just a fixation to make these people feel better. They never knew him or cared to, they just wanted someone to listen to them.

Because of the oddly vague and yet detailed style of writing it was hard to keep people and their relationships straight. Peoples' names changed midway through the book, many people's names started with B or M. I had to highlight and lookup more old times words than in any book ever before.

Overall, this was a failed attempt at moralizing, a downtrodden snapshot of the South in the Great Depression.
7 people found this helpful
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None Given
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Literature
Reviewed in the United States on April 17, 2024
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The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is a beautifully written novel that reveals to the reader the private depths of its characters' minds and souls. Published in 1940 and written about the lives of blacks and whites in a small Deep South city, I am surprised that the author wasn't "run out of town" (she lived in Columbus, GA that borders Alabama) for her empathetic expose about Blacks, Jews, and other marginalized peoples. Further she introduces Marxism and do-gooder socialists and union organizers. But the author won high praise. It is a very readable book and paints a picture that we all would do well to reflect upon.
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Gregory N. Hullender
4.0 out of 5 stars A Diary of False Hope
Reviewed in the United States on January 22, 2001
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Four principal characters pursue their dreams consumed with frustration that they can't achieve them. Mick Kelly is a 12-year-old musician who can't play anything but a radio. Biff Brannon is an impotent romantic. Jake Blount is a revolutionary who can't lead. Mady Copeland is a civil rights leader who can't convince his own people to follow him.
All four of them find some comfort in sharing their dreams with John Singer, a deaf-mute, who befriends all of them between summer 1938 and summer 1939. They only imagine that Mr. Singer understands them, of course; although he's a good enough lip reader to pick up some of what they tell him, on the whole all he does is nod and smile. The depressing thought is that maybe that's as good as it gets - for any of us. Anyway, with his death (though not as a direct result), the dreams of his friends all collapse.
People have complained that "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter" fails to offer any solutions to the problems it portrays, but sometimes a book doesn't need to offer an answer. This work reminded me somewhat of "Grapes of Wrath" in that respect. The characters are beautifully detailed, their problems range from comical to desperate, but there are ultimately no solutions. Both books excel making their world very real, and the problems of the protagonists become your problems too.
There are no answers here, as there are none in "Grapes of Wrath," but sometimes it's enough just to outline the problem clearly. And one can take some comfort in the fact that our world is much improved over the one McCullers depicts, so there is hope.
On a side note, the modern reader is constantly surprised how little concern for safety they had in the 1930s. Giving the baby a hard candy to quiet him down - or giving him a "good shake." Letting a 7-year-old play with a rifle. Or letting a 12-year-old watch an infant unsupervised. Another surprise is that the injustice of Jim Crow figures so prominently in a pre-World War II book; I had assumed the Civil Rights movement dated from after the war.
20 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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Feli-Mar Barbero
5.0 out of 5 stars Great reading
Reviewed in Canada on April 1, 2024
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Beautiful plot
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Moi
5.0 out of 5 stars Correspond au descriptif
Reviewed in France on January 1, 2024
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Rien à dire : un livre quoi
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EGG
5.0 out of 5 stars LECTURA
Reviewed in Spain on October 16, 2023
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PERFECTO
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FictionFan
5.0 out of 5 stars Only connect...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 4, 2020
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John Singer shares his life with his one friend, Spiros Antonapoulos. They are both deaf mutes and, while Singer can lip read, only Antonapolous understands his sign language. With all other people, Singer can only communicate by writing short messages on slips of paper. So when Antonapolous is committed to an asylum, Singer is left profoundly alone. He moves from the small apartment the two men had shared to a boarding house and takes all his meals at a local café, and gradually he attracts to him a small group of broken and lonely people, each of whom finds his silence allows them to talk openly to him in a way they can’t to other people.

Biff Brannon owns the cafe along with his wife, Alice. Lonely in his unsatisfactory marriage and childless, Biff watches the people who frequent the cafe and offers a kind of rough kindness to some of the misfits who happen along. Jake Blount is one such misfit – a drunk with Communist leanings who longs to meet others who share his politics. Mick Kelly is the daughter of the owners of Singer’s boarding house, a young girl whose life is circumscribed by the poverty of her circumstances, but who secretly longs to write music. And lastly of Singer’s little group of disciples is Doctor Benedict Copeland, a black doctor who has devoted his life to leading his people out of ignorance but has failed, even with his own family from whom he is now mostly estranged. Each sees in Singer someone who seems to understand them and gives them the courage to face the obstacles in their lives. But Singer, though he listens, cannot speak and lives for the rare occasions when he can take a break from work and visit his friend Antonapolous, where he frantically pours out all his pent-up thoughts through sign, to a man who seems neither to understand nor care.

For me, the stories of Biff and Jake didn’t work quite so well, though each had some points of interest. But Dr Copeland’s story is very well done, highlighting the poverty and cruel injustice experienced by black people, and the gulf between his ambition and the reality of what he could achieve within a system rigged against him. His character is also an excellent study of a man who is respected and even loved by the people he serves and leads in his wider community, but who fails utterly in his domestic life, taking his disappointments and frustrations out on his wife and children; a man so consumed with the desire to improve humanity that he fails to understand and connect with the individual needs of the humans around him.

Mick is a wonderful character and the one who gives a small glimmer of hope amid the general bleakness. McCullers’ description of her sneaking around to listen to music through the open windows of those wealthy enough to own radios and record players shows the real disparity of opportunity in this society where even the simplest cultural opportunities are available to only a fortunate few. Mick’s efforts to teach herself first to play piano and then to find a way to write down the music she hears inside her are beautifully written. Although the desperate poverty of her family means that her education has to give way to the need to earn money, there is the feeling that maybe she will somehow find a way to lead a more fulfilling life in time.

And Singer himself, for much of the book a silent background against which the stories of the others are played out, gradually becomes more vivid as the true loneliness of his life is shown – a loneliness caused, in his case, by physical rather than emotional barriers. Seemingly stable, holding down a job and surrounded by people who read into the blankness of him whatever they need and lack and then value him for that, he just wants that simple thing they see in him – a willing listener, someone who seems to understand.

While the premise is a stretch, with Singer’s deaf-mutism a rather contrived vehicle to bring this disparate group together, and while some of the stories work better than others, overall this is a profound and moving study of the ultimate aloneness and loneliness of people in a crowd, and of the universal human desire to find connection with another. The writing is beautiful, emotional but never mawkish, with deep understanding of the human heart and sympathy for human fallibility – a book that fully deserves its classic status.
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eleonora
5.0 out of 5 stars Carson Mccullers : quando il grottesco è attualità
Reviewed in Italy on April 5, 2020
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Ho acquistato la versione ebook perché mi serviva per dare un esame di letteratura. Il libro è stato una piacevole sorpresa. L'ho divorato. Una storia grottesca, che tratta il tema della diversità. Molto attuale (nonostante sia stata scritta molto tempo fa!)
Consiglio a tutti questo libro capace di fare riflettere e di far comprendere e apprezzare il tema del "diverso".
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