MADRID – Sixty-four years after it was originally published, Carson McCullers’ first novel “The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter” is still a literary phenomenon.

Holding the twenty-second position on The New York Times best-selling paperback’s list, thanks in part to being included in Oprah’s book club, but mostly due to its survival as a timeless tale of isolation and compassion.

Born in Georgia in 1917, Lula Carson Smith was a child piano prodigy, yet as a high school student, she suffered from rheumatic fever, which lead to crippling strokes throughout her life. Before graduating from Columbus High School, Carson decided to abandon the piano and become a writer. She read the works of Dostoevski, Chekhov, Tolstoy, and O'Neill, and began writing plays.

In 1934, Carson left Savannah and traveled to New York City, where she enrolled at Columbia University. Through a friend, she met James Reeves McCullers, Jr. in 1935 and a year later published "Wunderkind," which appeared in Story magazine. In 1937, Carson and Reeves married and returned to Charlotte, North Carolina, where Carson began work on her first novel, originally entitled “The Mute.” Carson found refuge in her characters during her painful bouts of bad health and personal trials. "I live with the people I create and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen," said McCullers.

Considered McCullers’ finest novel and an American masterpiece, “The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter” remains a paean to “the damned, the voiceless and the rejected,” each on an intense search for beauty.

ThinkExist.com remembers Carson McCullers, one of America’s pioneering women writers, through her own words, which transcended the written page and endure as her greatest heritage.

Quotes Courtesy of ThinkExist.com