Henry Green published his last novel, Doting, at forty seven. He drafts and redrafts a political farce, writes a couple of lacklustre stories, begins and drops a second volume of autobiography. Then he contributes a piece to The Spectator from which this is a heartbreaking excerpt:

Green can write novels, but his present difficulty is to know quite how to do it. As Time magazine says, Green is ailing, which means he has several things wrong with him which, rising sixty, is perhaps to be expected.

The same omnibus volume contains a movingly sad memoir of Green’s final years (he died at sixty-eight in 1973) by his son. There’s also a fabulous interview with Terry Southern:

Q.: Do you believe that a writer should work toward the development of a particular style?

A.: He can’t do anything else. His style is himself, and we are all of us changing every day – developing, we hope! We leave our marks behind us like a snail.