When this book was first published, it became an immediate literary sensation. Carson McCullers was just 23 years old. The story revolves around two deaf-mute friends, John Singer and Antonapoulos, and the four people who find themselves strangely drawn to Singer. Mick Kelly is a teenager who is passionately fond of music , often moved to tears on hearing Mozart and Beethoven and who is torn between her desire to help her family in hard times by taking a job and her desire to study music. Jake Blount is someone who has traveled widely in the South and seethes at the injustice meted out to blacks, who thinks himself as one of the few who ’knows’ and considers it his duty to tell all the ’don’t knows’. Dr. Copefield is a black doctor who is a follower of Karl Marx’s ideology and who waits patiently to organize his people to revolt against the White Man, and Biff is the bartender who quietly observes everyone in his bar and is puzzled by all the people who approach Singer to confide their troubles or just talk to him. Singer listens patiently to everyone and offers a cheerful countenance but his mind is only occupied with thoughts of his friend who is confined in an insane asylum. John Singer, the deaf-mute, comes to symbolize the person whom all human beings yearn for, someone who will listen, understand without condemnation, to whom we can unburden our hearts of its deepest fears and longings. There is no plot as such, but the characters throb with life, and a deep sense of compassion and empathy for the underprivileged and the social misfits shimmers throughout the novel.
Years later, in a tribute to the author , her friend Tennessee Williams wrote that she owned the heart and the deep understanding of it, but in addition she had that ’tongue of angels’ that gave her the power to sing of it, to make of it an anthem.