Volume 26, Number 7 · May 3, 1979
Flannery O'Connor's Gifts
By Robert Towers
The Habit of Being
letters by Flannery O'Connor, edited and with an introduction by Sally Fitzgerald
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 617 pp., $15.00
It is startling to recall that Flannery O'Connor would be only in her mid-fifties if she were alive today—roughly the same age as Allen Ginsberg and the Beat writers whose sentimental bohemianism she condemned. A majority of her correspondents are still alive and active. But though she lived into the age of rock 'n' roll and the cartoons of Jules Feiffer (which she enjoyed), she has already taken on the aura of a classical writer, of one who, despite the small body of her work and the narrowness of its range, seems as permanently seated among the American immortals as Emily Dickinson or Hawthorne. The South that she wrote about—the South of snuff-dipping poor whites, evasively sweet-talking Negroes, and sunken-eyed back woods prophets—was undergoing a dizzying transformation even as she (a contemporary and qualified admirer of Martin Luther King, Jr.) was writing about it on an electric typewriter.
Review, 3851 words
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