Volume 13, Number 3 · August 21, 1969
On Flannery O'Connor
By Richard Gilman
Mystery and Manners
by Flannery O'Connor, occasional prose selected and edited by Sally Fitzgerald, by Robert Fitzgerald
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 237 pp., $6.95
I first came to know Flannery O'Connor through a shy little note of thanks she sent me for some words of praise I had written about her first book of stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, in an obscure Catholic magazine called Jubilee. I remember that I described the stories as strange, brilliant, wholly original, and also that I resolutely kept from discussing them in any 'Catholic' perspective. She was especially grateful for that, she told me later when we had become friends. It wasn't that she thought there shouldn't be a Catholic perspective on her work—far from it—but that such a procedure ought to wait until her art was secure, as art. It was extremely important to her that her writing be seen as independent, particularly from any expectations about its moral or spiritual testimony.
Review, 2743 words
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