THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER CARSON MC CULLERS

THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER CARSON MC CULLERS

THE WRITER

Carson McCullers was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia in 1917. Her mother was the granddaughter of a plantation owner and a war hero on the Confederate side of the Civil War. Her father was a watchmaker and jeweller who gave her a typewriter for her 15th birthday. At this time, McCullers also contracted rheumatic fever and began to suffer from strokes.
In September 1934, McCullers left home, planning to study piano at Juilliard in New York but she lost the money set aside for her tuition. Instead she worked in menial jobs and studied creative writing with Texas writer, Dorothy Scarborough, at night classes at Columbia University and with Sylvia Chatfield Bates at New York University She decided to become a writer and published an autobiographical piece, Wunderkind, in Story magazine in 1936. It depicted a musical prodigy's failure and adolescent insecurity and also appears in The Ballad of the Sad Cafe collection.
From 1935 to 1937 she divided her time, as her studies and health dictated, between Columbus and New York and in September 1937 she married an ex-soldier and aspiring writer, Reeves McCullers. They moved to South Carolina, where she wrote The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. (The title, suggested by McCullers's editor, was taken from Fiona MacLeod´s poem "The Lonely Hunter.")
Altogether she published eight books. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941) and The Member of the Wedding (1946), are the best-known. The novella The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951) also depicts loneliness and the pain of unrequited love.
McCullers and Reeves separated in 1940 and divorced in 1941 and she moved back to New York. In Brooklyn, she became a member of the art commune February House. Among her friends were the poet W.H. Auden, writers Paul and Jane Bowles, the composer Benjamin Britten and the burlesque artist Gypsy Rose Lee.
Her close friends during the post war years in Paris included Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams. In 1945, McCullers remarried Reeves but this time the marriage ended in his suicide in Paris in 1947. By the following year, McCullers´ left side was entirely paralyzed by continuing strokes, although she continued to write.
She died in New York in 1967, after a brain haemorrhage, and was buried in Oak Hill Cemetery. Her unfinished autobiography, Illumination and Night Glare, was published in 1999.

THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER

Written in Charlotte, North Carolina, in houses on Central Avenue and East Boulevard, the novel centres on a deaf-mute man named John Singer who lives in a mill-town in Georgia during the Depression.
The struggles of four of John Singer's acquaintances make up the majority of the narrative: Mick Kelly, an adolescent tomboy who loves music and dreams of buying a piano; Jake Blount, a labour agitator; Biff Brannon, the observant owner of a diner; and Dr. Benedict Copeland, an idealistic and broken African- American doctor at odds with his family.
At the novel's core is the silent and mysterious Singer. Not only does Singer suffer from an often-misunderstood affliction, his demeanour and place in the social fabric of this intimate Georgia town speak of humanity itself. He is pensive, dignified, compassionate and caring and becomes the confidant of other people´s lost dreams.

Each of McCullers' characters grapples with something—adolescence, rage, insecurity, depression, prejudice or poverty –and the whole society is suffering from the upheavals of the 1930s. Through them, McCullers brings us face-to-face with our moral isolation. She reminds us that no matter how many people we are surrounded by, we are ultimately alone in our heart of hearts.
The book enjoyed a meteoric rise to the top of the bestseller lists in 1940 and was the first in a string of works by McCullers to give voice to the rejected, forgotten, mistreated and oppressed.
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was filmed in 1968 with Alan Arkin in the lead role.

QUESTIONS TO THINK ABOUT WHILE READING

"This book is literature. Because it is literature, when one puts it down it is not with a feeling of emptiness and despair (which an outline of the plot might suggest), but with a feeling of having been nourished by the truth.¨ May Sarton. Do you agree that the truths the book explores are nourishing? Or are they depressing?
The characters all struggle with a sense of isolation. How does McCullers depict loneliness in the book?
The book was viewed as anti-fascist when it came out. Do you see it as a political book, a religious book or neither?