SOURCE: Evans, Oliver. “The Tongue and the Heart: The Case of the Silent Singer.” In Carson McCullers: Her Life and Work, pp. 36-58. London: Peter Owen, 1965.

In the following essay, Evans discusses The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter as an allegorical novel.

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The novel on which Mrs. McCullers had started to work during the year she was ‘resting’ in Columbus did not begin to take definite shape until after her marriage, and even then it did so very gradually. She knew that it was to be a book whose central theme was loneliness and love, and she had roughly decided on its pattern: the protagonist was to be a Jew about whom the other characters knew very little but to whom, for some reason, they all turned in their distress and confided their innermost hopes and fears. Somewhere in an art gallery she had seen a portrait of...