SOURCE: Perry, Constance M. “Carson McCullers and the Female Wunderkind.” Southern Literary Journal 19, no. 1 (fall 1986): 36-45.

In the following essay, Perry investigates McCullers's 1936 short story, “Wunderkind,” as the origin of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and surveys the autobiographical aspects of the novel.

Carson McCullers's first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), symbolizes her own story of growing up in the thirties as a Southern female prodigy. Like her predecessor Frances Newman, who also wrote a novel about a Southern girl who longs to be an artist, The Hardboiled Virgin (1926), McCullers shows how “social forces” damaged ambitious people, particularly when they were female (“Author's Outline” 129). For example, a humiliating sexual initiation is a central experience for each heroine. Recent discussion of McCullers's novel has examined its connection to other novels about aspiring women artists, treating Mick as the major character (Huf 105-123). In The Heart Is...