In poor taste.

Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) was a Southern Writer and lifelong devout Roman Catholic, both of which characteristics were food for her body of work - two novels and many short stories.

Flannery's creativity emerged early and was recognized at both graduate school at the Iowa Writer's Workshop at University of Iowa and at Yaddo, a writer's retreat in upstate NY. During this period she wrote what was to become her first novel, Wise Blood. Once she was established as a writer with a body of published work, she often gave lectures on writing fiction.

O'Connor had many supporters and detractors. Despite the misunderstood subject matter of her stories, often containing violence and cruelty, she remained true to her faith and morality, saying in one of her many presentations on writing "If the writer is as an artist, his moral judgment will coincide with his dramatic judgment. It will be inseparable from the very act of seeing." For Flannery morality meant conveying a vision. She spent hours editing her stories in order to convey that vision.

She kept up a lively correspondence with friends and colleagues. But also served as a mentor to aspiring writers, many of whom made the initial overture addressed to her simply at Milledgeville, GA, and only some of whom she met in person. To one, a student at the time but later a poet and critic, and who admitted to a crisis of faith, she wrote of "mystery," which had become an important theological concept for her: "Where you have absolute solutions ... you have no need of faith...Mystery isn't something that is gradually evaporating. It grows along with knowledge."

She was a contemporary of many southern writers, including William Faulkner, Carson McCullers and Katherine Porter, all of whom knew her and held her in high regard.

Diagnosed with lupus in 1951, she carried on most of her literary career with deteriorating health. Her life was cut short in 1964 at age 39. Some accolades at her death, regarding her writing, attest to the impact she made in that short life:

Thomas Merton: I write her name with all honor, for all the truth and all the craft with which she shows man's fall and his dishonor.

Robert Giroux, her publisher, spoke of her "clear vision" that "not only burns brighter than ever but it burns through the masks of what she called 'blind walls and low dodges of the heart' "

When asked why she wrote about freaks, she replied, displaying her considerable wit, "...because we are still able to recognize one."

Many articles and books have been written about her and her work. This is but one. It tells of her career, but also gives glimpses of her personal life: her immediate family and extended relations, her school days, and her love of birds, especially peacocks which she kept on her farm. A good overview and introduction to to an iconic writer. ( )

After enjoying Flannery's stories for a long time, it was great learning more about her life, inspiration and process. ( )

I remember reading WISE BLOOD and some of O'Connor's stories when I was in grad school, back in 1969-70. I can't remember if I knew then that O'Connor had only died about five years earlier. What I do remember is how taken I was with her odd characters in that "grotesque" southern literature she became so famous for. Brad Gooch's biography, FLANNERY, answered a lot of questions about O'Connor's short, mostly cloistered sort of life. There is so much information here, about her early schooling in Savannah, her family's devout Catholicism, her college days in Georgia and Iowa, her fascination with birds (chickens, pheasants, and especially peacocks). I mean, geeze, there's a LOT of stuff in here, most of which I found pretty damn interesting.

The thing is, O'Connor only wrote a couple of books. And there's a collection of about thirty stories she wrote over her short career, before she died of complications from lupus at the age of 39 in 1964. Apart from her grad school days in Iowa and a short stay in NYC, O'Connor spent most of her life on the family farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, living with her mother. There are indications here that she may have been 'gay,' but Gooch never asserts this straight out, since it can't be proven. But her relationships with men always seemed chaste and/or problematic in some way; and there were a couple of close friendships with women (Betty Hester and Maryat Lee) that remained 'unrequited,' probably because of O'Connor's very strong sense of 'sin' - from her very Catholic upbringing. She was also a student of theology and divinity, which showed up so darkly in her quirky stories.

What I perhaps enjoyed most of all in Gooch's narrative were all the literary 'connections' in O'Connor's life, with the mentions of such luminary lights as: Elizabeth Hardwick, Caroline Gordon, Alfred Kazin, Robert Lowell, Robie Macauley (who later became the fiction editor for Playboy), Robert Penn Warren, Katherine Anne Porter, James Dickey (and his son, Christopher), Pete Dexter and many others. Because traveling was distasteful and often physically problematic for O'Connor, many of these folks admired her work enough to come to her.

So, given that most of O'Connor's life was spent in rural Georgia, how in the hell did Gooch manage to make this book so interesting? Well he relied heavily on O'Connor's voluminous correspondence and personal papers, and he used these sources very well. He must have, because I was fascinated by this bio of the somewhat reclusive O'Connor. I need to get hold of her Collected Stories to reacquaint myself first hand with her work. If you are a devotee of Flannery O'Connor, then this book is a must-read. Highly recommended. ( )

well-written - good distillation of her wrtings & letters - from Gr co