The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940) is a Southern Gothic novel written by Carson McCullers, one of the most prominent American literary voices of the 20th century. Set in a small unnamed town, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter captures the spiritual isolation and loneliness of five ordinary people in the deep American South in the 1930s. McCullers is known for her contributions to the development of the Southern Gothic subgenre, and her novels feature themes of race, industrialization, and the cultural changes that challenged the Southern way of the life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter was McCullers’s debut novel. An instant bestseller, it launched her iconic literary career.

This guide was written based on the 1st Mariner Books edition of the novel published in 2011.

Content Warning: This guide references vocabulary from the original work relating to disability and race that is considered offensive. This guide also includes discussions of alcoholism, death by suicide, police brutality, and racism.

Plot Summary

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter follows the intertwined stories of five people in a small Southern town.

John Singer, an intelligent and kind man who is deaf, becomes lonely when his only friend, Spiros, who is also deaf, is committed to a psychiatric hospital.