There's a new (really the first thorough) biography of Flannery O'Connor, called Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor
written by Brad Gooch. I know nothing about Mr. Gooch, but Jonathan Yardley's review in Sunday's Post certainly had me intrigued:
Of few writers can it more accurately be said that it is the work, not the life, that matters. Apart from her struggle against lupus, almost nothing of moment happened to her. But readers understandably have long been curious about this quiet woman who wrote such powerful, occasionally violent, frequently funny novels and stories, yet whose work is infused with the most passionate religious conviction.
The difficulty for would-be biographers has been that O'Connor's mother, Regina Cline O'Connor, outlived her by more than three decades and guarded her flame with a possessive zeal almost unmatched in the long history of literary flamekeepers...
Now we have "Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor." No doubt O'Connor, who delighted in giving her characters unusual if not outlandish names such as Lucynell Crater, Hazel Motes and Francis Marion Tarwater, would be tickled to know that the author of her first full-scale biography is named Brad Gooch.
Found: HERE
By Jonathan Yardley
FLANNERY
By Brad Gooch
Little, Brown. 448 pp. $30
In February 1951, Flannery O'Connor was diagnosed with systemic lupus erythematosus, the disease that had killed her father 10 years earlier at the age of 45; she died of it 13 years later at the age of 39. In between that diagnosis and her death, she wrote almost nonstop. It is a life's work slender enough to be contained in a single volume in the Library of America, yet it occupies a large place in any critical assessment of American literature and in the hearts of readers here and abroad. That O'Connor was one of the great writers of the 20th century is now beyond argument.
HERE
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