Clock Without Hands was published by Houghton Mifflin, Boston, on 18 September 1961, in a first printing priced at $4.50. It was McCullers’s fourth and final novel, written over a decade of severe illness — she suffered multiple strokes beginning in 1947, and by the late 1950s the left side of her body was paralysed. She dictated much of the novel. The reviews were mixed to negative, and the book has never achieved the critical standing of her earlier work. Yet it remains a significant document: McCullers’s attempt to grapple directly with race and civil rights at the most volatile moment in the movement’s history.
The Novel
J.T. Malone is a pharmacist in Milan, Georgia, who has been diagnosed with leukaemia and given fifteen months to live. Judge Fox Clane is an elderly former congressman, bloated, senile, obsessed with a scheme to redeem Confederate currency. Jester Clane is the judge’s seventeen-year-old grandson, confused about his identity and attracted to Sherman Pew, a young Black man whom the judge has hired as a companion — not knowing that Sherman is the son of a Black man the judge once helped to lynch.
The novel braids these four stories against the backdrop of the Supreme Court’s desegregation rulings. The judge organises resistance to integration; Sherman moves into a white neighbourhood; the town responds with a bombing. McCullers treats each character with her characteristic empathy, including the judge — a monstrous figure who is also pitiable, his racism inseparable from his senility and his loss of power.
Writing Through Illness
The novel took McCullers over ten years to complete. She began it in the early 1950s, but repeated hospitalisations and her deteriorating physical condition slowed the work to a crawl. By 1960 she could no longer type and relied on dictation. Friends and editors, including her devoted publisher Robert Linscott, helped shape the final manuscript. The novel’s unevenness — some sections are as sharp as her best work, others feel loose and undercooked — reflects these circumstances.
McCullers herself was aware of the novel’s limitations. But she was determined to publish it: she wanted to say something about race in America, and she wanted to say it in the form of a novel rather than an essay or a speech. The result is imperfect but honourable — a sick woman’s refusal to be silent about the most important moral issue of her time.
Collecting Clock Without Hands
First edition (1961, Houghton Mifflin): First printing, $4.50.
Identification points:
- “First Printing” stated or identifiable via number line
- Houghton Mifflin imprint
- Dust jacket by Milton Glaser
Approximate market values:
- Fine/Fine in dust jacket: $300–$800
- Signed first edition: $1,000–$3,000
- Without jacket: $50–$150
Value trajectory: The least collected of McCullers’s novels but appreciated by completists. Milton Glaser’s dust jacket design is handsome and adds to the book’s appeal as an object. Signed copies are scarce — McCullers’s physical condition made signing difficult in her final years.
The novel is rarely discussed alongside the canonical civil rights fiction of the period — Ellison’s Invisible Man, Baldwin’s Another Country, Walker’s short stories. This is partly because McCullers’s reputation rests on her earlier, more formally accomplished work, and partly because the novel’s execution does not match its ambitions. But its concerns are genuine, and its portrait of a Southern town tearing itself apart over desegregation has a documentary honesty that the more celebrated works sometimes lack. McCullers knew these people; she grew up among them; she understood their fear.