The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is the debut 1940 novel by American author Carson McCullers. Written in Charlotte, North Carolina, in houses on Central Avenue and East Boulevard, it is about a deaf man named John Singer and the people he encounters in a 1930s mill town in the U.S. state of Georgia. It created a literary sensation on publication, enjoying a meteoric rise to the top of the bestseller lists in 1940 and was the first in a string of works by McCullers to give voice to the rejected, forgotten, mistreated and oppressed. The novel was chosen as a selection for Oprah's Book Club in 2004.

In 1998, the Modern Library ranked The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter seventeenth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.