The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

by Carson McCullers

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Critical Overview

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The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was met with almost universal critical acclaim when it was published. Many reviewers found it to be an incredibly polished work, and they were flabbergasted that such a book could be written by an author who was only twenty-three. When Richard Wright, one of America’s greatest novelists and the author of the classic Native Son, reviewed the book in the New Republic, he put its young author in the company of Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner. “Her quality of despair is unique and individual: it seems to me more natural and authentic than Faulkner,” he told readers, adding that “she recounts incidents of death and attitudes of stoicism in sentences whose neutrality make Hemingway’s terse prose seem warm and partisan by comparison.” Wright, who was black, was especially impressed with Mc- Cullers’ ability to handle black characters without being insulting or condescending. The thing that was most impressive to him was “the astonishing humanity that enables a white writer, for the first time in Southern fiction, to handle Negro characters with as much ease and justice as those of her own race.” Novelist May Sarton reviewed the book in the Boston Evening Telegraph and found it to be such an incredible work of literature that minor flaws that would have been acceptable in other novels stood out here as being unnecessary. She found the inclusion of tragedies caused by accident and not by the lives of the main characters, such as Bubber shooting Baby and Mick’s sexual encounter with Harry, to weaken the story. “Neither is false,” Sarton quickly explains. “Both are believable but neither is necessary. The beauty of the book is that except for these, every action seems inevitable.” Rose Feld praised the novel in The New York Times Book Review, finding that McCullers possessed a “rich and fearless” imagination and “an astonishing perception of humanity.”

After the publication of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, McCullers’ reputation grew, as she continued to produce powerful works of literature that commanded serious consideration. Her next publication, the novel Reflections in a Golden Eye, was published in 1941: it was well-received, but it suffered by comparison to the surprise and delight critics had gotten from the first book. “[I]t was then regarded as somewhat disappointing in the way that second novels usually are,” Tennessee Williams wrote in the introduction to the 1950 edition. “When the book preceding a second novel has been very highly acclaimed, as was The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, there is an inclination on the part of critics to retrench their favor, so nearly automatic and invariable a tendency that it can almost be set down as a physical law.” His essay goes on to look at aspects that could be seen as weak, and to explain how they had been misunderstood. Her third novel, The Member of the Wedding, was published in 1946, and it clearly established McCullers not only as a writer with control and skill, but as one with her own vision, as readers became accustomed to the solidity of her style. Now assured that her initial success was not just a fluke, her works received widespread analysis from literary critics. Marguerite Young’s review in The Kenyon Review looks at the book as an intellectual piece, like a chess game or a modern poem. She explained that “Mrs. McCullers, sometimes depicted as a sensationalist reveling in the grotesque, is more than that because she is first of all a poetic symbolist … ” Her only other major publication was the 1951 collection The Ballad of the Sad Cafe and Other Works. The novella in the title is considered one of her best works, but reviewers were divided about McCullers’ short fiction. In a review of a book published after her death that collected poems, essays, and short stories, David Madden noted that comparing a timeless book like The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter to her short fiction shows readers “how poorly a first-rate talent can sometimes function.”

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