SOURCE: "A Remarkable First Novel of Lonely Lives," in The New York Times Book Review, June 16, 1940, p. 6.

In the following review, Feld provides brief character descriptions and a plot synopsis of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.

No matter what the age of its author, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter would be a remarkable book. When one reads that Carson McCullers is a girl of 22 it becomes more than that. Maturity does not cover the quality of her work. It is something beyond that, something more akin to the vocation of pain to which a great poet is born. Reading her, one feels this girl is wrapped in knowledge which has roots beyond the span of her life and her experience. How else can she so surely plumb the hearts of characters as strange and, under the force of her creative shaping, as real as she presents...