Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor.

Gooch, Brad (author).

Esteemed biographer Gooch (author of City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara, 1993) pulls, with great fondness and understanding, the life and personality of Flannery O’Connor, the much celebrated Georgia novelist and short story writer, out from under the false impression, which has lasted for decades, that O’Connor was “an eccentric recluse.” Her lifetime was relatively brief; she was diagnosed with lupus in her twenties and died of that disease in 1964 at age 39. But she was fierce in her determination to write, appreciating her own worth as a fiction writer. Although confined for many years before her death at the family farm outside Milledgeville with her widowed mother, she was an active and highly regarded member of the American literary scene of her day, keeping in close touch with important editors and luminaries in prose and poetry who were “crucial to her literary career.” Her many short stories and two novels were, despite their frequent depictions of violence, grounded in O’Connor’s deep Catholic consciousness. Gooch comfortably traces her fiction to its real-life roots in a meticulous yet seemingly effortless writing style, resulting in the definitive biography as well as providing the impetus for general readers to return to O’Connor’s timeless fiction.