Flannery O’Connor Immersion

by philg

I just finished reading Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor, the 2009 biography that had gotten such great reviews everywhere, supplemented by The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor. I had always loved her work, but knew nothing about the author. It saddened me to learn that she had died at age 39, a victim of lupus. Being a significant contributor to American culture seems to be hazardous; George Gershwin died after about 39 years as well (of a brain tumor).

Brad Gooch’s achievement as a biographer is too complex to summarize in a blog posting, but I will say that I learned a bit about what enabled Flannery O’Connor to become one of America’s greatest writers at a young age. She kept her life monkishly simple, with few possessions, no spouse, and no children. She almost always had friends or family who took care of her basic needs, which freed her to block out two hours every day in which to write. Her mind was not cluttered with calling the plumber, straightening out the cable TV bill, preparing tax returns, running after children, etc.

The biography is highly recommended for those who are interested in the literary life of mid-century America (O’Connor lived from 1925 to 1964). It is also interesting for its exploration of Southern writing, e.g., Walker Percy and William Faulkner. Finally the book is interesting because O’Connor’s last decade overlapped with the beginning of radically changed relations between blacks and whites in the U.S. and in the South.

The funniest letters in the collection are replies to English Literature professors from O’Connor. It is rare that a living writer is confronted with academic interpretations of his or her work. In the case of O’Connor, it seems that the Ph.D.s teaching her work to young people expended a lot of effort and yet failed to comprehend anything that she was trying to communicate. (This subject is also treated in the Rodney Dangerfield movie Back to School when Kurt Vonnegut is brought in to confront the professors who’ve been teaching his novels.)

Now it is time to reread Flannery O’Connor : Collected Works.

2 thoughts on “Flannery O’Connor Immersion”

  1. The few short stories by her that I have read, leave me quite unimpressed. Phil, can you suggest some particular works of hers that you feel are worth reading?

  2. Patrick: The biography chronicles the fact that most critics did not begin to appreciate Flannery O’Connor until they’d read quite a bit of her work. The stories as a set are apparently more convincing than one story at a time. Wise Blood was her first novel and I would start there. It is short and concise. O’Connor considered her best short story to be “The Artificial Nigger”, which seems to be available online at http://nonplatonic.com/wasabiroot/02.11.07/an.html

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