[For] me not a word could be added or taken away from this marvel of a novel ["Clock Without Hands"] by Carson McCullers.

Her talent is extraordinary: the name of her first book "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter" might be a description of it: the steady life-giving beat that is the core of every book: the pursuit of the quarry she sees and would catch and hold for us, often something so fleeting and ephemeral that most authors would quail at trying to catch it in words—and Mrs. McCullers' words are the coin of every day, plain, frank, slangy, unemotional. Above all her gift is apart, aloof, inevitably lonely: it owes nothing to any other writer and is paradoxical, a sure sign of richness: it is powerful yet humble, dignified yet utterly unpretentious….

"Transcendental"; "master of peculiar penetration"; "an incomparable storyteller." These praises of Carson McCullers do not exaggerate, yet I think that she has something more rare: a capacity for telling the unvarnished truth. This sounds simple but it is extraordinarily difficult for a sensitive writer to reach the real truth of what he or she sees; sensitivity glosses with its very depth of feeling; it is the bedevilment of writers, especially women….

Of course truth is not always palatable. There are parts in this book that even now may shock in their matter-of-fact treatment of certain subjects. Truth, too, can give an uncomfortable bleakness, and one can well understand that, of Mrs. McCullers' novels, only "The Member of the Wedding," a masterpiece, has become universally popular. This book may well be too strange and strong, too frank, for many people. But like J. T. Malone [its main character], it grows richer and quieter as it draws towards its end….