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

While Gooch's writing isn't the most eloquent, it is fine-ish. The portrait he offers of O'Connor feels complete and I feel as though I have a stronger understanding of O'Connor as both a writer and a person. the 4-stars are more a reflection on how i feel about getting to understand o'connor a bit more and not really a reflection of the quality of writing. if i were rating gooch's prose...1 1/2 stars. but, gooch had access to a lot of documentation and information about o'connor and even though his writing style is clunky, he does succeed in sharing o'connor with readers. ( )

The life of Flannery O'Connor and the work she produced would be of interest to any fan of her. But Brad Hooch fails in his attempt to bring her life to the page. I say "fail" but mean "didn't even try". Read why here:

http://mewlhouse.hubpages.com/hub/Flannery-OConnor-Deserves-a-Better-Man ( )

This book is a must for anyone, like me, who loves Flannery O'Connor's work. Her story is remarkable in that someone who lived such a circumscribed life was able to have such a lasting impact on literature. Because of the lupus that killed her at 36, Flannery lived most of her adult life as isolated as Emily Dickinson. Since she has a small body of work and her stories are often grotesque, she was a mysterious figure to me until I read this biography. Now I can read her stories and understand where they come from. Her devout Catholicism and her physical and mental isolation account in large part for the world of her stories. My only quibble with the biography is that it ends rather abruptly, with little discussion about how and why she is more important writer in death than she was in life. It occurred to me while reading this that first, I have been reading Flannery O'Connor for almost as long as she was alive and secondly, were she still alive she would be about the same age as the current greatest living short story writer, William Trevor. What wonders might she have produced had she lived! ( )

In the midst of re-reading _The Habit of Being _ (a collection of Flannery O'Connor's correspondence) and her stories & occasional writings, I happened on this recent biography at a bargain price. I was interested in filling in some of the gaps in the writer's life, and this bio was an opportunity to do that.

The chief strength of this biography is the way the author shows how Flannery O'Connor seized on details of her (relatively circumscribed) life and (chiefly literary) acquaintance for the genesis of many of her stories. The potential danger of this, which Gooch largely (although sometimes just barely) sidesteps, is that it may give the impression that O'Connor's fiction was largely a way to externalize and improve on the events and preoccupations of her personal life. Anyone who is already familiar with her stories will probably not be too disturbed by this treatment, but I think some readers of the biography who are not yet well-acquainted with O'Connor's fiction may have their reception of the stories, when they do eventually read them, tainted by the notion that the stories are all in some way "autobiographical." Caveat lector.

I suppose Gooch chose this way of recounting O'Connor's life, in part at least, because otherwise the biography would be a fairly bare tale (Flannery herself famously opined that no one would ever write the story of her life because it was so uneventful). By showing how personal details are reflected in her stories, the biographer manages to show that Flannery's imagination was so fertile that any small detail of her daily life could light a creative spark that she would fan into a blaze of glorious story-telling. Indeed, the account of her early years, for which Gooch depended on snippets of memories from people who knew her only slightly or from a distance, is the weakest part of the book, and the least sympathetic to the subject.

I would say that the weakness of the book, which will trouble many O'Connor devotees, is the fact that, while he clearly admires O'Connor as a writer, the biographer does not seem very sympathetic toward, or understanding of, the fundamental moral and theological wellsprings of her life and work. Since Flannery O'Connor repeatedly insisted that such was the absolute source of her creativity and the unswerving orientation of her life, it seems to me a significant weakness in a biography that the biographer has such a tenuous grasp on what really animated the life he is writing.

In the final analysis, I find this biography of Flannery O'Connor interesting, useful, but fundamentally flawed. I'm sorry that Sally Fitzgerald never finished her own biography of her friend's life, which would probably have given a much more sympathetic and understanding view, and which Brad Gooch mentions in his Acknowledgments as something that Fitzgerald worked on for many years but never completed. Nonetheless, I'm glad to have read Gooch's treatment of O'Connor's life, as it did what I had hoped, filling in the gaps left by _The Habit of Being_ and fleshing out some of the real-life characters who meant so much to her. ( )

Loved this look into Flannery's world ... and the possible events that inspired/influenced her stories. ( )

Flannery is a really well written biography. It made me want to go back and reread all Flannery O'Connor's short stories. The biography made me wish that I could have known her. I think that I would have liked her and I know that I admire the way she lived her short life. ( )

I love Flannery O'Connor, but Icouldn't make it through FLANNERY. Just a bit too weedy for my tastes. Sorry. ( )

See Joseph O'Neill's superb discussion, Touched by Evil," in Atlantic Monthly June 2009

Not knowing anything about Flannery O'Connor's life but having read some of her stories, I expected her to have a dark and twisted childhood; I'm happy to be wrong.

Gooch uses mountains of letters and interviews to get into O'Connor's short life from her birth and death in Georgia and all the other places in between. His approach is very "here are the facts--do with them as you will," and I liked how he didn't try to interpret the meaning behind her works as there seem to be enough other tomes that do that.

I now want to read the O'Connor novels I've missed and reread her stories and also delve into her prose and all the letters she wrote. Flannery O'Connor's story doesn't just end with this biography--it keeps on, and I think Gooch did an excellent job of telling it all while making the reader thirst for more.

Great quote by O'Connor in the opening page,"As for biographies, there won't be any biographies of me because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chik yard do not make exciting copy."