I was hooked after reading The Lame Shall Enter First years ago. In her work I sensed an ambivalence not only about the South, but toward Catholicism as well. I suspected it was that fluctuation that sparked her brilliance. (Interesting that she was friends with Thomas Merton.)

As much as I admire her body of work, I know so little about her. I look forward to reading the biography.

I remember reading The Artificial Nigger many years ago and being so shocked by the act of betrayal at the center of that story that I had to physically put the book down and walk away. It was an act of emotional and moral violence so forceful that it left me disturbed and stunned. I've never had a response to anything in literature quite like it. I found her work to be revolutionary in that way. The shock and awe of A Good Man is Hard to Find. The redemptive, mystical vision of Revelation. The spiritual possession in Parker's Back. And the patient and even-handed treatment of each and every fatuous wingnut throughout her stories. What compels about O'Connor is that she was brave enough to acknowledge that in spite of our pretenses we stand always on the edge of total anarchy and violence.

I think the reason the bio has been delayed is that The Habit of Being, her collected letters, seemed to do the trick for a long time. That said, I'm really excited about this, although from the sound of this review, some of the more interesting things about O'Connor sound elided. The sexuality issue, for example. (It would be interesting to think about her dislike of McCullers in the context of this.) So much has been written on her literary influences (Merton, for example, and Le Fanu) that I'm not surprised it was left out in the bio. She once said that she was so tired of interviewers asking her if she and Frank O'Connor were related that she was going to start claiming to be his mother.

After that crappy piece in the New York Times, this article is particularly refreshing. Thank you for not trying to marginalize O'Connor's Catholicism, which I feel most literay analysts do (they they avert their gaze embarrassingly from O'Connor's Catholicism the way their predecessors did from Willa Cather's lesbianism). And what great comments on the (seeming) dualty between O'Connor and McCullers.

It's good to hear that O'Connor didn't think much of To Kill a Mockingbird. Now granted, in a country where The Old Man and the Sea is considered great literature, perhaps Harper Lee's novel is rightfully exalted as well. I mean if one marginal, rather false work is going to be raised to the pantheon, why not another? Harper Lee's novel is certainly well-written, well-crafted and appealing, with a good moral. But I don't think it's a work of genius or great insight by any means. Glad to know O'Connor didn't, either.

Okay, I'll get off my soapbox about that. Sorry to hear she couldn't appreciate Tennessee Williams, one of the America's greatest playwrights.

You make persusive points about Brad Gooch's work, and the aid of his outsider perspective to his description of O'Connor's own outsider perspective. Is this the same Brad Gooch who wrote a gay/bisexual novel I read called Scary Kisses, back in the 80's? No reviewer has mentioned it, but how many authors can there be named Brad Gooch?

in the immortal (if slightly inaccurate) words of their like-named song, "Lupus took the life of Flannery O'Connor; she wrote many books before death came upon her."

I was interested to read that O'Connor's work influenced Cormac McCarthy.

Is there any better way to characterize McCarthy's work than by O'Connor's description of her own stories' essence?:

"The action of grace in territory held largely by the devil."

1. In fact, the family in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is murdered by three escaped convicts, not two. (The third is named Hiram.)

2. While Bruce Springsteen’s song “Nebraska” alludes to the closing lines of “Good Man,” another song on his “Nebraska” album, “Reason to Believe,” borrows key elements of O’Connor’s story “The River,” in which a child drowns shortly after being baptized in an outdoors Pentecostal “healing” ceremony. (Is it coincidence or augury that the Springsteen album immediately prior to “Nebraska” was entitled “The River”?)

3. It wouldn’t be difficult for O’Connor any other writer to be “invariably more humorous” than Hemingway, since Hemingway was and is hardly celebrated for his sense of humor. But to add to Allen Barra’s list of priceless O’Connorisms, here’s one of my favorites, from “Good Country People”: “Mrs. Freeman had a special fondness for the details of secret infections, hidden deformities, assaults upon children. Of diseases, she preferred the lingering or incurable.”

4. In my opinion, O’Connor’s humor is central to the reason she continues to be read, while other writers of her generation (and those before it) have fallen into obscurity. Then, too, she had a great respect for the art of storytelling that’s likewise contributed to her longevity. All of O’Connor’s stories (excluding only her early student efforts) were fully realized and unfailingly satisfying, despite their sometimes grim conclusions. The faith in her work isn’t simply of the Catholic sort; it’s also faith in painstaking craft. And so the work survives -- indeed flourishes -- and we now have a biography of a woman who rightly maintained that her life was too outwardly dull to make for one.

It wouldn’t be difficult for O’Connor any other writer...

Can you spot the missing word? I didn't till it was too late. Editing on a screen is impossible!

End of vain outburst.

Dear "Subversia"

In case you're still looking for that "missing word", you might go back to the review and grab one or two off this wagoncart of a sentence: "On the plus side, he does not, as many critics have, try to impose a fatalism on her born from her lupus;..."

I hate it when anyone tries to mash a fatalism on top of anyone else's born from their lupus.

Level Best as Ever,

David Terry (who, yes indeed, is among the 875,000 or so folks who wrote a gradstoodint thesis on O'Connor)

www.davidterryart.com