It is hard to believe that The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was the first book of a twenty-three-year-old author (who had started the novel at nineteen!). This tragic, small-town drama is so ambitious in its scope—presenting five radically different characters whose troubled lives intersect in the Depression-era South—it always seems like the work of a master storyteller.

The Big Read is a program of the National Endowment for the Arts designed to revitalize the role of literary reading in American popular culture. Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America, a 2004 NEA report, identified a critical decline in reading for pleasure among American adults. The Big Read addresses this issue by bringing communities together to read, discuss, and celebrate books and writers from American and world literature.

A great book combines enlightenment with enchantment. It awakens our imagination and enlarges our humanity. It can even offer harrowing insights that somehow console and comfort us. Whether you’re a regular reader already or making up for lost time, thank you for joining The Big Read.

Reader’s Guide Information:

Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940) is set in a small Georgia mill town in the late 1930s. At the center, like the hub of a wheel, is John Singer, who rents a room in the Kelly house after his fellow deaf companion, Spiros Antonapoulos, is sent away to an asylum. The amiable Singer is a confidant for four of the town’s misfits—Mick Kelly, a teenage girl who dreams of becoming a trained musician; Benedict Mady Copeland, the town’s black doctor; Jake Blount, an alcoholic socialist; and Biff Brannon, the owner of the local café.

Each of these four characters regularly visits Singer, telling him about the injustices and pain in their lives. Each outcast believes that only Singer can understand his or her loneliness, although Singer reveals little of himself to them. He does, however, open himself to Antonapoulos through visits and letters. Singer even saves his hard-earned money to buy a movie projector for his friend.

Over the course of a year, the characters encounter difficult troubles and find solace in Singer. Mick drops out of school to help support her family after her younger brother accidentally shoots a little girl. Dr. Copeland has tuberculosis and his son, Willie, is sent to jail. New to town and friendless, Jake yearns to help the working class, but his alcoholism muddles his message and carries him toward self-destruction. Biff’s wife dies, leaving him with a deeper longing to relate to his patrons, and sad that he doesn’t have his own children. Not until the novel’s startling climax do any of these lonely souls fully appreciate Singer’s importance in their lives.

Whether quiet or roaring, deliberate or reckless, the five voices of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter unite in a common cry of isolation, a theme that reverberates through McCullers’s other works. Yet, a glimmer of hope remains. “All is serene,” McCullers writes toward the end of her story—life is an old whistled tune, water pitchers are full of zinnias, and the morning sun will come again.

Source:  The Big Read | National Endowment For The Arts

Download the
2011 Big Read Brochure (PDF)