The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is a book only a writer who drank herself to death alone on the deck of a cruise ship could have written, and she wrote it at 23. Published in 1940, it was Carson McCullers’s debut, a novel about a group of misfits in a Georgia mill town in the 1930s, and it quickly became a bestseller. Since then, it has become a classic, but a quiet one, the sort of book that makes it on “Greatest Novels of the 20th Century” lists and a book nearly every library has but that most English syllabuses don’t. And to be quite honest, that’s what drew me to it the first time. I was 17 with a truck, a half-sunken GPA, and a girlfriend old enough to buy me a beer from the Exxon station. I wouldn’t have been caught dead with assigned reading, and I wouldn’t read pulp because I wanted to be a writer — and not one that you could buy at the grocery store. I found an old copy in the library, a taped-up paperback with yellow pages. It was between McCullers and Naked Lunch, and I thought author William Burroughs was for the type of self-serious guy who played guitar and then choked on the cigarettes he bummed from you at the party, so I checked out The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. The novel has no gimmicks, no pomp, and no circumstance.