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    A Study Guide for Carson McCullers's The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
    A Study Guide for Carson McCullers's The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
    A Study Guide for Carson McCullers's The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
    Ebook43 pages45 minutes

    A Study Guide for Carson McCullers's The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Carson McCullers's "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateAug 21, 2015
    ISBN9781535837217
    A Study Guide for Carson McCullers's The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

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      A Study Guide for Carson McCullers's The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter - Gale

      2

      The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

      Carson McCullers

      1940

      Introduction

      The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was Carson McCullers' first novel, published in 1940, when the author was just twenty-three years old. It started out as a short story in a creative writing class, and an early, working draft of the novel, then called The Mute, was submitted for a Houghton Mifflin Fiction Fellowship, for which McCullers won a cash prize and a publishing contract. Her editors at Houghton Mifflin convinced her to change the title. Upon its publication, the book was received positively by reviewers, who were all the more enthusiastic about it because of the author's young age. The book introduced themes that stayed with McCullers throughout her lifetime and appeared in all of her works, such as spiritual isolation and her notion of the grotesque, which she used to define characters who found themselves excluded from society because of one outstanding feature, physical or mental. The story takes place in a small town in the South in the late 1930s. The five central characters cross paths continually throughout the course of about a year, but due to the imbalances in their personalities they are not able to connect with one another, and are doomed to carry on the loneliness indicated in the title. An indication of their lack of coping mechanisms is that the one character that the other four confide their hopes and aspirations and theories to is a deaf mute, who cannot fully understand them nor communicate back to them anything more than his nodding acceptance of what they tell him. Throughout her short career, McCullers' novels continued to present characters who were cut off from mankind, although, many critics believe, never as successfully as in this first, brilliant stroke.

      Author Biography

      McCullers was born Lulu Carson Smith on February 19, 1917, in Columbus, Georgia. Her family had deep roots in the South: her great-grandfather, Major John Carson, owned a two-thousand acre plantation with seventy-five slaves before the Northern army burned the plantation and freed the slaves during the Civil War. Her father, Lamar Smith, was a watchmaker, like Mick Kelly's father, and owned a jewelry shop like the one John Singer works in. From early childhood, Lulu Carson was expected to achieve great fame, and while she was growing up her parents did what they could to encourage her interest in music. She started formal piano lessons at age ten, and progressed swiftly through her studies in music, which were intense and consuming. After a bout with pneumonia at age fifteen, she started to question whether she had the stamina to be a concert pianist, and turned her attention to writing. She kept her parents believing that she was interested in music, and so when she was seventeen she was sent to New York to study at the Juilliard School, but when she arrived, she enrolled at Columbia University, which had better creative

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