Singer experiences the agony of isolation because the one person he cares for has been taken away, but his infinite gentleness somehow consoles the other four as he becomes their confidant.
They are all estranged from family and community and alienated by their thwarted desires and ambitions. The four are cafe-owner Biff Brannon political radical Jake Blount, a heavy drinker Benedict Copeland, a black doctor and Mick Kelly, a 12-year-old tomboyish and inquiring girl with unattainable dreams of a musical career. When Singer moves into the Kelly family boarding house, he becomes the focus of four lonely people who create in him the image of their own desires. With the publication of her first novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers, all of twenty-three, became a literary sensation. It centres on the enigmatic John Singer, a 32-year-old deaf mute who finds himself alone after sharing 10 years of a routine with his only friend and fellow mute, Spiros, who has been confined in a mental hospital after increasingly unstable behaviour. The novel is set in a town in the US south, probably similar to the one in which the author herself grew up. The novel’s protagonist is a deaf man, John Singer, who lives in a Georgia mill town during the 1930s. With its profound sense of moral isolation and its sensitive glimpses into the inner lives of lonely people, it is considered McCullers’s finest work. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter must rank as one of the most impressive of debut novels, all the more remarkable when one considers that it was published when McCullers was only 23. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, novel by Carson McCullers, published in 1940. Carson McCullers is buried in the same cemetery in Nyack, New York, as the painter Edward Hopper – surely fitting, as they have been well-described as “two of America’s most penetrating mediums of loneliness”.
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