SOURCE: Carr, Virginia Spencer. “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.” In Understanding Carson McCullers, pp. 15-36. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990.

In the following essay, Carr discusses thematic and stylistic aspects of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.

Carson McCullers worked on the manuscript that eventually became The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter under the influence of Sylvia Chatfield Bates, her creative writing teacher at New York University who had recommended her to Whit Burnett's short-story writing course at Columbia University. Believing in the young student's potential, Bates encouraged McCullers to submit a short story she had written in her class, “Wunderkind,” to Story magazine, edited by Burnett. He bought the tale for publication in the December 1936 issue of Story and listened, also, to the long rambling plot of a novel that his young pupil explained had been gestating for almost a year.¹

Several months later, while...