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Modern Classics Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
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Modern Classics Heart Is a Lonely Hunter Paperback - 2006

by Carso McCullers


About this book

Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is the author’s first in her string of works that lift the voices of the outsiders. The debut novel tells the story of a deaf-mute man named John Singer, who lives in an unnamed mill town in Georgia in the late 1930s. Left alone after his close friend and roommate is sent away, Singer moves into a boarding house and soon becomes the confidant of four of the town’s mistfits. His new acquaintances include Mick Kelly, a spirited young girl from a poor family; Jake Blount, an alcoholic social reformer; Dr. Benedict Mady Copeland, an idealistic black physician; and Biff Brannon, the childless owner of the local café that brought the group together. These five voices share a common cry of isolation, the novel’s principal theme. Thus, some understand the characters experiencing this shared isolation to be grotesque, a Southern Gothic literary term for elements — often exaggerated — in dissension of social and cultural formations. However, others argue that the work is far too rooted in realism to fit the aforementioned bill.

Having quickly risen to the top of the bestseller lists in 1940, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter was a literary sensation. Modern Library ranked the novel seventeenth on its list of the “100 Best” English-language novels of the 20th century. It was also included in TIME’s “100 Best Novels” (since 1923 to 2005). A film adaptation was made in 1968, starring Alan Arkin, Sondra Locke, and Cicely Tyson. In March 2005, a stage adaptation premiered at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, Georgia and began touring shortly thereafter, commissioned and produced by the Acting Company of New York City. And after being selected for Oprah’s Book Club in 2004, Houghton Mifflin, McCullers's publisher throughout her life, rushed out 700,000 copies of a new paperback edition. As a result, the 64-year-old novel was the No. 1 bestseller for a brief time in May of that year.

From the publisher

'She has examined the heart of man with an understanding ... that no other writer can hope to surpass' Tennessee Williams

Often cited as one of the great novels of twentieth-century American fiction, Carson McCullers' prodigious first novel was published to instant acclaim when she was just twenty-three. Set in a small town in the middle of the deep South, it is the story of John Singer, a lonely deaf-mute, and a disparate group of people who are drawn towards his kind, sympathetic nature. The owner of the caf where Singer eats every day, a young girl desperate to grow up, an angry socialist drunkard, a frustrated black doctor: each pours their heart out to Singer, their silent confidant, and he in turn changes their disenchanted lives in ways the could never imagine. Moving, sensitive and deeply humane, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter explores loneliness, the human need for understanding and the search for love.

First Edition Identification

Houghton Mifflin Company first published Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter in 1940. Bound in cream cloth with dark red lettering, the 356-page first edition states “1940” on both the title page and the copyright page. 

Details

  • Title Modern Classics Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
  • Author Carso McCullers
  • Binding Paperback
  • Edition International Ed
  • Pages 320
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher Penguin Group, England
  • Date 2006-08
  • ISBN 9780141185224 / 0141185228
  • Weight 0.55 lbs (0.25 kg)
  • Dimensions 7.7 x 5 x 0.9 in (19.56 x 12.70 x 2.29 cm)
  • Dewey Decimal Code FIC

About the author

Carson McCullers (Author)
Carson McCullers was born in 1917. She is the critically acclaimed author of several popular novels in the 1940s and '50s, including The Member of the Wedding (1946). Her novels frequently depicted life in small towns of the southeastern United States and were marked by themes of loneliness and spiritual isolation. McCullers suffered from ill health most of her adult life, including a series of strokes that began when she was in her 20s; she died at the age of 50. The Member of the Wedding was dramatized for the stage in the 1950s and filmed in 1952 and 1997. Other films based on her books are Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967, with Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando), The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1968, starring Alan Arkin) and The Ballad of the Sad Caf (1991). Kasia Boddy (Introducer)
KASIA BODDY is a senior lecturer in English at UCL. She is the author of Boxing: A Cultural History (2008) and co-editor (with Ali Smith & Sarah Wood) of Brilliant Careers: The Virago Book of Twentieth-Century Fiction (2000); she has contributed an introduction to the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.
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The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
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The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

by Mccullers, C.

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The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Heart Is A Lonely Hunter
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