Story set in a small Southern town about plain Miss Amelia and her relationship with Marvin, her spurned husband, and with Lymon, a hunchbacked dwarf who charms his way into her life.

"In The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940), one of the most extraordinary debuts in modern American literature, an enigmatic deaf-mute draws out the confessions of an itinerant worker, a young girl, a doctor, and a widowed cafe proprietor. The disfiguring violence of desire is explored with shocking intensity in two shorter works, Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941), a tale of murder and madness at an army base, and The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1943),...