The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

John Singer, a deaf mute engraver, ekes out a quiet routine in a Georgia mill town until his only friend, a heavier and less capable deaf man named Spiros Antonapoulos, is committed to a state asylum after a spell of drunken, erratic behavior. Alone for the first time in years, Singer moves into a boardinghouse and becomes an unlikely confessor to four very different people who each read their own hopes into his silence. Mick Kelly, a restless teenage girl who wants nothing more than a piano and a way out of poverty, visits him after school and hears music in her head when there is none in the house. Jake Blount, an alcoholic labor organizer certain that a workers uprising is coming, rants to Singer about capital and injustice long into the night. Biff Brannon, who runs the all night diner and has just lost his wife, watches the town's small tragedies pass across his counter. Dr. Benedict Copeland, an idealistic Black physician, tries to instill pride and purpose in his patients and in his own grown children, who want an easier life than the one he has chosen for them. None of the four know each other well, and none know that Singer, who nods and seems to understand everything, actually grasps almost none of what they tell him; he misses Antonapoulos with the same wordless intensity they bring to him. When Antonapoulos dies in the asylum, Singer travels alone to see him buried, returns to his rented room, and shoots himself without leaving an explanation, the one silence none of the four can read meaning into no matter how hard they try.

McCullers was twenty three when Houghton Mifflin published her debut, and the novel reads with a patience unusual for a first book, moving in careful, unhurried chapters between four braided storylines that only meet at Singer's door. Nothing about the town's daily humiliations, a factory wage cut, a father's temper, a doctor's exhaustion, is rushed toward a lesson, and the effect on a reader is closer to sitting quietly beside each character than being told what to feel about them. Some readers find Blount's political speeches the weakest thread, closer to argument than to character, while Mick Kelly's sections, drawn from McCullers's own adolescence, are usually the ones readers remember longest.

The manuscript went to Houghton Mifflin under the working title The Mute, and McCullers changed it only shortly before publication to a line pulled from a poem by the Scottish writer William Sharp, who published under the name Fiona Macleod. She wrote most of the book in rented rooms in North Carolina, working from a detailed outline she had sent the publisher before the novel existed.