The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

1930s small-town Depression-era Georgia, USA. John Singer, a deaf mute, finds himself alone after his only friend is committed to a mental asylum. Little by little, four others in the community, almost equally solitary, find themselves drawn to him. They pour out their hearts, reveal to him their innermost thoughts, yearnings, disappointments, and he listens in silence and can reply only with short written notes. To them he has the aura of an almost godlike presence, yet, tragically, none of them see him for who he really is. Nor, each in their own estranged worlds, ever realise how much they… show more.

Impossible to fathom how Carson McCullers could have distilled such wisdom into her soul by age twenty-three, and then produced this book. The passions and losses, violence and ambition, guilts and loves, of her cast of small-town 1930s Americana characters, wander across the pages like spectres disrupted by a shifting wind. 

The lost, struggling to hear each other's songs above their own pain, but continuing to try through the long night, no matter the chance of success. 

I first bought a copy of this in Sandusky, Ohio, in 1993, on a day off from working at Cedar Point Amusement Park,… show more.