In spite of ill health and a physical incapacity that threatened her career, Carson McCullers completed a novel in the summer of 1961 that made the best-seller list before its official publication; date by virtue of prepublication sales. In an interview at her home, the noted novelist looked back on some of her problems of recent years and spoke without emotion of her latest book, Clock without Hands, her first in fifteen years, "For many years I had been thinking of the novel and finally wrote it this passed year. ""The tall, frail novelist, forty-three years old in 1961, suffered a series of strokes in her twenties that left her partially incapacitated, and she also admitted that a mental block kept her away from writing for many years after the strokes. Mrs McCullers once wrote that "writing is a wandering, dreaming occupation. " But beyond the admission that she works" very hard" at her writing, she is shy about discussing her work. She is remote from literary fashions, and she has never learned to intellectualize her art, but she reads her critics and takes them seriously. Clock Without Hands depicts   Mrs McCullers' native South and the slow passing of the old way of life through the lives of a dying pharmacist  , a white judge and former congressman, his rebellious grandson, and two Negroes. Among her earlier noted works are Member of the Wedding, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, and Ballad of Sad Cafe. According to the selection, Mrs McCullers  _  .
follows literary fashions intellectualizes her art discusses her work avidly takes her critics seriously