Posted on 07/06/2007 8:36:26 AM PDT by Mr. Silverback
For 20 years the letters sat in sealed boxes in a library at Emory University. But in mid-May, the seals were broken. Lovers of great fiction are now reading hundreds of private letters penned by the celebrated Christian writer, Flannery O’Connor.
O’Connor wrote the letters to her friend, Elizabeth Hester, who donated the letters to Emory on condition they remain closed to the public—until now.
The correspondence sheds light on the private musings of a writer whose novels and short stories provide one of the undisputed bright spots in twentieth-century fiction.
Flannery O’Connor was born in 1924, in Savannah, Georgia. After spending two years at the famous Iowa Writers Workshop, she returned to Georgia, where she wrote short stories and raised peacocks. Although she died young—at age 39—she produced some of the most powerful fiction with Christian themes ever written.
O’Connor represents the tail end of the Southern Literary Renaissance that included William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, and Robert Penn Warren. But she differed from them in that she was, above all, a Christian writer. According to critic Dorothy Walters, O’Connor’s “bizarre narratives of absurdly comic Southerners are governed by the stern purity of a rigidly Christian view.”
O’Connor knew her Christian faith was an anomaly in a world grown complacent, materialistic, and secular. So to reach the prosperous, comfortable folk who made up the bulk of her readers, O’Connor used jarring, comic situations and grotesque, unsophisticated characters. She intended to shock her readers out of their entrenched complacency, especially in matters of faith.
The genius of O’Connor was that she could portray religion in an up-close and unfiltered way she knew many readers would find uncomfortable. For example, in her novel, The Violent Bear It Away, a sophisticated schoolteacher named Rayber dismisses faith as irrational. But then he stumbles upon a little girl evangelist. Her sermon on God’s love hits him like a punch in the stomach. “Do you know who Jesus is?” the little girl asks. “Jesus is the Word of God and Jesus is love. The Word of God is love and do you know what love is, you people? If you don’t know what love is you won’t know Jesus when He comes. You won’t be ready.”
Well, you won’t find that kind of talk in many other 20th-century novels. O’Connor knew her audience would identify with the schoolteacher and would be as disturbed and affected as he was by the powerful words coming from the mouth of an innocent little girl.
Much of O’Connor’s fiction had this effect on its readers as it has had on me. There is something in her writing that haunts the reader so that he cannot easily dismiss it.
You may not have a chance to visit Emory University and read Flannery O’Connor’s private correspondence. But if you’ve never read O’Connor’s fiction, tuck one of her novels or books of short stories into your beach bag this summer. And then, the next time you encounter a sophisticated, modern secularist—one who sneers at religious faith—ask him if he’s read any Flannery O’Connor.
Her writing just might be the instrument God uses to open his or her eyes to the truth.
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BreakPoint/Chuck Colson Ping!
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The 1979 John Huston film of ‘Wise Blood’ is pretty good too.
I’ve read all of Flannery O’Connor’s published work. Many of the short stories are great, but I agree with Chuck Colson that “The Violent Bear it Away” is her greatest novel. It’s right up there with the very best.
Bibliopath ping?
She was just a “Hillbilly Thomist”!
I’ve only read one of her short stories...I don’t recall the title, but it’s the one where the family on a road trip takes a wrong turn down a dirt road and meets up with a serial killer. I was very, very impressed with her writing.
Heh! Fits the descrition of a lot of us, I suspect. Of course, as one person said when it came to martyrdom, "If God's going to tell you o ride that bus, he's going to give you the ticket."
Flannery O’Connor, one of the great Southern writers.
“She would of been a good woman,” The Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
I can remember her from a college course I had in Modern American Literature. Her work was a welcomed break from the modernist writers like O’Neil and the others. Eudora Wealty was another treasure..
A good man is hard to find
A Good Man is Hard to Find is the name of the story. An unofficial sequel was published by John Stessel a few years ago. It’s entitled Every Angel is Terrifying-tells what one of the killers did afterward. That story was nominated for a World Fantasy award, and it was reprinted in Datlow/Windling’s The Year’s Best Horror and Fantasy for 1998.
Flannery O’Connor was a Modernist every step of the way. In the tradition of T.S. Eliot (another traditionalist Catholic). O’Neill was more pre Modernist (Naturalist).
That’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” One of the classics. But there’s quite a lot more good ones, and her published letters are worth reading, too, after you get done with the fiction.
“The 1979 John Huston film of ‘Wise Blood’ is pretty good too.”
So, someone other than my wife and i saw this film. Disturbing, but interesting. Didn’t remember it being based on Flannery O’Connor’s work, until now.
Is is called “A Good Man is Hard to Find”. Read it in college and I have never and will never forget that story. It gives me great pause at evil that was so real it hurt. And I see the evil of those men throughout society in cold blooded killers. Very good and disturbing story.
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