Francis Marion Tarwater’s uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and [...]
Toward the end of her life, Flannery O’Connor was often asked to speak about being a Southerner, as though this were a peculiar condition in need of explanation. In “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South,” a composite essay published from two of her last public talks, she sums up what she thinks of her [...]
As I laid this Christ-haunted collection of short stories down, I felt the phantom presence of Flannery O’Connor and was sure that she was smiling with pleasure at the manner in which this later generation of writers had followed so faithfully in her inspired and inspiring footsteps. Previously in these pages, I highlighted the wealth of [...]
O.E. Parker is constantly looking in the mirror. Vanity of vanities. Parker is one of Flannery O’Connor’s crazy misfits. A tough dropout who was captivated by the mystique of tattoo at the age of fourteen when he saw the tattooed man at the county fair. Having a tattoo made the poor idiot feel special, so [...]
Alan Jacobs patiently explains why even the most scrupulous of scholars can’t understand the first thing about Flannery O’Connor’s stories without at least a good deal of biblical literacy.* Well, a real poet or a person with genuine artistic and psychological sensitivity can understand something about her writing without the Bible. John Huston’s film version [...]
Art is the pulse of the soul. It expresses much of what is kept hidden and even what could not be expressed in any other form. Many people talk of a crisis in modern art—its abstractness, banality, and, could we even say, ugliness. If there is such a crisis, to me, it is nothing other [...]
Susan Srigley brings to the fiction of Flannery O’Connor what others have not: a truly Catholic frame of reference informed by Thomas Aquinas. In her study of the South’s preeminent fictionist, Flannery O’Connor’s Sacramental Art, Susan Srigley reconsiders three of Flannery O’Connor’s most significant figures: Hazel Motes, Francis Tarwater, and Ruby Turpin. The former are, [...]
If original sin lies at the heart of Bruce Springsteen’s work, redemption lurks out there somewhere too. In 1989, the year before his death, the great Southern novelist Walker Percy wrote a letter to rock-and-roll legend Bruce Springsteen, which read, in part: This is a fan letter—of sorts. I’ve always been an admirer of yours, [...]
The Prophetic Poet and the Spirit of the Age by Marion Montgomery (in three volumes): Why Flannery O’Connor Stayed Home (1981), Why Poe Drank Liquor (1983), Why Hawthorne Was Melancholy (1984) Marion Montgomery’s trilogy is an ambitious, indeed audacious, assessment of the social, political, literary, religions, and philosophical temper of the Western world since the [...]
A Life of Flannery O’Connor, by Brad Gooch Mary Flannery O’Connor described herself as a 13th century Catholic and she was right. Surprisingly in an age given to nihilism, progressivism, and consolidation this traditional, Southern, cerebral, talented and orthodox Catholic is among America’s most important writers. There are any number of literary, cultural, and psychological [...]
Flannery O’Connor Flannery O’Connor and the Language of Apocalypse, by Edward Kessler. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. The Correspondence of Flannery O’Connor and the Brainard Cheneys, edited by C. Ralph Stephens. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986. A recent review in the New York Times employed the phrase, the Flannery O’Connor industry,” in [...]
Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South by Ralph C. Wood. The Incarnational Art of Flannery O’Connor by Christina Bieber Lake. Flannery O’Connor continues to interest many readers and critics. A slow and painstaking writer who died young (of lupus at age 39), she did not produce a large body of literature, but what she did produce (in [...]