The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (First Edition)

McCullers, Carson. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1940. First edition, first printing, with 1940 on both the title page and copyright page. In the first-state dust jacket, retaining the original $2.50 price on the front flap; the rear panel bears a photograph of the author and three reviews, and the rear flap carries a review of E. Arnot Robertson’s Summer’s Lease. Octavo. 356 pages. Original oatmeal cloth, lettered in maroon; in the original pictorial dust jacket. Very good book in a good plus dust jacket. The volume shows typical foxing to the endpapers and boards, with some fading to the lettering; the binding remains sound. The jacket shows age-appropriate wear, including several closed tears, rubbing, chipping, light fading to the spine, edge wear, wear at the lower ends of the flap folds, and a small dampstain at the base of the spine. Overall, a very attractive copy of McCullers’s first book. Published when McCullers was twenty-three, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter announced one of the most distinctive voices in twentieth-century American fiction. Set in a Georgia mill town and centered on the deaf-mute John Singer, the novel traces a circle of isolated characters whose longings for recognition and connection converge upon him. Its compassion, psychological acuity, and treatment of loneliness, race, class, disability, and political idealism established McCullers immediately as a major Southern writer. First printings in the scarce first-state jacket are highly sought after, and this complete, unrestored-looking example retains strong collector appeal despite its honest signs of age.…