Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers was an American novelist, short-story writer, playwright, and poet whose work often examines isolation, frustrated attachment, and life in the southern United States. Clock Without Hands, issued by Houghton Mifflin in 1961, was her final novel. Set in a Georgia town during the early years of school integration, it interweaves four perspectives across race, class, age, and political memory. McCullers had begun the project years earlier under the working title The Pestle, and part of it appeared in magazines before the completed book. Its shifting viewpoints extend the ensemble method readers encounter in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, while its civic argument gives prejudice and responsibility unusual prominence. McCullers first trained seriously as a pianist, then studied writing in New York. Her other major books include The Member of the Wedding and The Ballad of the Sad Café. Clock Without Hands closes her novel career by turning private loneliness into a wider portrait of a community facing irreversible change.