mccullers carson the heart is a lonely hunter

The lives of Miss McCullers' characters are resolved thus: Mick Kelly is doomed to a life of wage slavery in a five-and-ten-cent store Dr. When the deaf mute's friend dies in an insane asylum, he commits suicide, an act which deprives the confessional of its priest. A recent news story says she is married and now lives in New York. Because the novel treats of life in the South, we assume that she is Southern born and reared. The jacket of the book tells us with great reserve that she is twenty-two years old. It is impossible to read the book and not wonder about the person who wrote it, the literary antecedents of her style and the origins of such a confounding vision of life. Hovering mockingly over her story of loneliness in a small town are primitive religion, adolescent hope, the silence of deaf mutes-and all of these give the violent colors of the life she depicts a sheen of weird tenderness. And she recounts incidents of death and attitudes of stoicism in sentences whose neutrality makes Hemingway's terse prose seem warm and partisan by comparison. Her groping characters live in a world more completely lost than any Sherwood Anderson ever dreamed of. Her quality of despair is unique and individual and it seems to me more natural and authentic than that of Faulkner. Miss McCullers' picture of loneliness, death, accident, insanity, fear, mob violence and terror is perhaps the most desolate that has so far come from the South. Out of the tradition of Gertrude Stein’s experiments in style and the clipped, stout prose of Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway comes Carson McCullers' 'The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.' With the depression as a murky backdrop, this first novel depicts the bleak landscape of the American consciousness below the Mason-Dixon line.

Mccullers carson the heart is a lonely hunter