SOURCE: McDowell, Margaret B. “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940).” In Carson McCullers, pp. 31-43. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980.

In the following essay, McDowell delineates the defining characteristics of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.

I. Isolation as Man's Fate

The principal theme of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), Carson McCullers declared, lay in the first dozen pages: an individual's compulsion to revolt against enforced isolation and his or her urge to express the self at all costs. She thought of the work in 1938, even in one of its earliest forms in The Mute, as consisting of variations on this principal concept. Thinking of her projected novel as analogous to a work of music, she enumerated in her proposal to Houghton Mifflin, five “counter-themes” that would, each of them, elaborate upon the central theme: the need for a person to create a unifying principle or god; the likelihood...