Book Reviews
A remarkable book.... [McCullers] writes with a sweep and certainty that are overwhelming. Her art suggests a Van Gogh painting peopled with Faulkner figures.
New York Times
There is not only the delicately sensed need that one might expect youth to know but an even more delicately sensed ironic knowledge.
Chicago Tribune
McCullers writes with a calm and factual realism, and with a deep and abiding insight into human psychology. She does so without an iota of vulgarity and bawdiness, in a manner which many a present day novelist would do well to study.
Boston Globe
To me the most impressive aspect of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is the astonishing humanity that enables a white writer, for the first time in Southern fiction, to handle Negro characters with as much ease and justice as those of her own race.
Richard Wright - New Republic
McCullers leaves her characters hauntingly engraved in the reader's memory.
The Nation
When one puts [this book] down, it is with...a feeling of having been nourished by the truth.
May Sarton
McCullers's gift was to evoke, through an accumulation of images and musically repeated phrases, the singularity of experience, not to pass judgment on it.
Joyce Carol Oates