![]() ![]() People like Flannery O'Connor, Truman Capote, Eudora Welty, and Thornton Wilder were all publishing landmark works in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. When McCullers published The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Southern gothic, and Southern literature in general, was on fire. To read more about the genre itself, check out the "Genre" section. ![]() It was a super popular genre, practiced by heavy-hitters like William Faulkner. Basically, Southern gothic is a genre that mixes traditional gothic elements – mystery, suspense, anxiety, the grotesque, the supernatural – and plops it all down in the American South. Top it off with a rollercoaster of a marriage that ended in her husband's suicide, and you've got yourself a tough life.Ĭarson McCullers was very much a Southern writer, and Hunter is very much a Southern gothic book. In case you weren't impressed enough already, she did all of this while battling some severe health issues: McCullers suffered a series of strokes while she was very young, and she battled depression and substance abuse issues throughout her life. Over the next twenty-ish years, she wrote novels, short stories, plays, reviews, articles, poems, and even Hollywood scripts. The novel was a breakout hit and jump-started McCullers' extremely successful literary career. ![]() She wrote and published her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunterin 1940, when she was twenty-three years old. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter IntroductionĬarson McCullers makes us feel like slackers. ![]()
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