"When she was only twenty-three this, Carson McCuller's first novel, created a literary sensation. She is very special, one of America's superlative writers who conjures up a vision of existence as terrible as it is real, who takes us on shattering voyages into the depths of the spiritual isolation that underlies the human condition.

 This novel is the work of a supreme artist, Carson McCullers's enduring masterpiece. The heroine is the strange young girl, Mick Kelly. The setting is a small Southern town, the cosmos universal and eternal. The characters are the damned, the voiceless, the rejected. Some fight their loneliness with violence and depravity, some with sex or drink, and some -- like Mick -- with a quiet, intensely personal search for beauty." (1981 Bantam paperback.)

"This book is planned according to a definite and balanced design. The form is contrapuntal throughout. Like a voice in a fugue each one of the main characters is an entirety in himself--but his personality takes on a new richness when contrasted and woven in with the other characters in the book."--Carson McCullers

"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.  For one knows at the end, that it is these cheated people, these with burning intense needs and purposes, who must inherit the earth.  They are the reason for the existence of a democracy which is still to be created.  This is the way it is, one says to oneself - but not forever." - May Sarton.  ``Pitiful Hunt for Security:  Tragedy of Unfulfillment Theme of Story That Will Rank High in American Letters." Boston Evening Transcript.  June 8, 1940.

A Review of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Richard Wright.

Secondary Sources