The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

This is a classic, and one (of many) that I somehow missed along the way. It was the author's debut novel, published when she was just 23 years old. She and her husband Reeves McCullers were penniless, awaiting the last portion of the advance on the book so that they, both aspiring writers, could move to New York City. Reeves had gone off to work on a boat on Nantucket island and McCullers had little premonition of the literary sensation the book would become – or how completely it would transform her life. It was published in the summer of 1940. Despite Roosevelt’s New Deal, the depredations of the Great Depression had sucked hope from America’s bones, birthed a generation that had only known want and that was skeptical of the possibility of change and the United States was on the cusp of entering the war raging in Europe and Asia. The book is set in the time it was written in a poor Georgia mill town. The cast of characters is: There is Mick, tomboyish, dreaming of taking lessons so that she may learn to compose music. There is Jake, labor agitator, often seeking and never finding, in between bouts of drunkenness. There is Doctor Copeland, dignified and well-read, who engrosses himself in Black liberation through his studies and finds that he can no longer understand his children, his people. There is Biff, owner of the New York Café, always watchful and worried. They each struggle with feelings of isolation, the sense that no one shares their concern and yet none of them connect with each other. Instead they reach out to John Singer, a deaf man who works understands speech by reading lips. Because he does not speak, Singer rarely interrupts, and the others—rather ironically it turns out—come to view him as a good listener. It is a sad story about a sad time that we hope not to return to.