Volume 37, Number 7 · April 26, 1990
The Power of Flannery O'Connor
By Frederick C. Crews
Collected Works
by Flannery O'Connor, edited by Sally Fitzgerald
Library of America, 1,281 pp., $35.00
The Art and Vision of Flannery O'Connor
by Robert H. Brinkmeyer Jr.
Louisiana State University Press, 201 pp., $22.50
The Comedy of Redemption: Christian Faith and Comic Vision in Four American Novelists
by Ralph C. Wood
University of Notre Dame Press, 310 pp., $32.95
Flannery O'Connor: The Imagination of Extremity
by Frederick Asals
University of Georgia Press, 268 pp., $13.00 (paper)
Hobbled and enfeebled by a disease that would kill her at age thirty-nine, but determined not to be a drain on her mother's household economy, Flannery O'Connor, in her dozen years of fame, was inclined to seize every chance to earn a modest honorarium on the college lecture circuit. Venturing as far as Notre Dame or Wesleyan or as near as her hometown alma mater, Milledgeville's Georgia State College for Women, she would read a story or deliver one of her standard, virtually interchangeable, talks about 'The Grotesque in Southern Fiction' or 'The Church and the Fiction Writer' or 'The Catholic Novelist in the South.' And to hear her tell it, the questions from the floor were almost as predictable as the lectures. 'Everywhere I go,' she once observed, 'I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.'
Review, 8052 words
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