Big Read 2013: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter  

Click book image to access the Big Read web page for The Heart is a Lonely Hunter featuring a reader’s guide, a teacher’s guide, and an audio guide.

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This library guide supports the Community College of Allegheny County’s 2013 Big Read book selection, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, by Carson McCullers. "The Big Read is a progam of the National Endowment for the Arts, designed to revitalize the role of literature in American culture and to encourage citizens to read for pleasure and enlightenment. The NEA presents The Big Read in partnership with Arts Midwest."

Use this guide to find resources to locate information about the author, the novel, and/or themes and other connections to the story. Click on the tabs above to link to resources provided by CCAC libraries, websites, and other materials and sources of information. Enjoy!

"In a swift radiance of illumination he saw a glimpse of human struggle and of valor. Of the endless fluid passage of humanity through endless time. And of those who labor and of those who -- one word -- love." --Carson McCullers from The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Carl Van Vechten Collection, [reproduction number, e.g., LC-USZ62-54231]   

From the catalog description:

“With the publication of her first novel, THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER, Carson McCullers, all of twenty-three, became a literary sensation. With its profound sense of moral isolation and its compassionate glimpses into its characters' inner lives, the novel is considered McCullers' finest work, an enduring masterpiece first published by Houghton Mifflin in 1940. At its center is the deaf-mute John Singer, who becomes the confidant for various types of misfits in a Georgia mill town during the 1930s. Each one yearns for escape from small town life. When Singer's mute companion goes insane, Singer moves into the Kelly house, where Mick Kelly, the book's heroine (and loosely based on McCullers), finds solace in her music. Wonderfully attuned to the spiritual isolation that underlies the human condition, and with a deft sense for racial tensions in the South, McCullers spins a haunting, unforgettable story that gives voice to the rejected, the forgotten, and the mistreated -- and, through Mick Kelly, gives voice to the quiet, intensely personal search for beauty.”