The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was met with almost universal critical acclaim when it was published. Many reviewers found it to be an incredibly polished work, and they were flabbergasted that such a book could be written by an author who was only twenty-three. When Richard Wright, one of America's greatest novelists and the author of the classic Native Son, reviewed the book in the New Republic, he put its young author in the company of Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner. "Her quality of despair is unique and individual: it seems to me more natural and authentic than Faulkner," he told readers, adding that "she recounts incidents of death and attitudes of stoicism in sentences whose neutrality make Hemingway's terse prose seem warm and partisan by comparison." Wright, who was black, was especially impressed with Mc- Cullers' ability to handle black...