ens, prose-writers such as Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Katharine Anne Porter, has not been
             succeeded or supplemented by any new figures of corresponding stature with the sole exception of the prodigious
             young talent that first appeared in 1940 with the publication of her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. She
             was at that time a girl of twenty-two who had come to New York from Columbus, Georgia, to study music.
             According to the legends that surround her early period in the city, she first established her residence, quite
             unwittingly, in a house of prostitution, and she found the other tenants of the house friendly and sympathetic and had
             not the ghost of an idea of what illicit enterprise was going on there. One of the girls in this establishment became
             ...