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Loading... Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connorby Brad Gooch
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Loved this look into Flannery's world ... and the possible events that inspired/influenced her stories. (  ) Lillian3 | Oct 4, 2009 |  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. (  ) kothomas | Aug 9, 2009 | 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."  GEPPSTER53 | Jul 16, 2009 | I love Flannery O'Connor, but Icouldn't make it through FLANNERY. Just a bit too weedy for my tastes. Sorry. (  ) brianjayjones | Jun 17, 2009 | MsPibel | Jun 11, 2009 | 
 Gooch is excellent on O'Connor's bereavement following her father's death, her sequestration in her mother's house, and the ambiguous gifts illness granted her, but he's not quite so engaging in the years when O'Connor left home to study and write, the latter during stints at the artistic poseurs' compound at Yaddo.
Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0316000663, Hardcover)The landscape of American literature was fundamentally changed when Flannery O'Connor stepped onto the scene with her first published book, Wise Blood, in 1952. Her fierce, sometimes comic novels and stories reflected the darkly funny, vibrant, and theologically sophisticated woman who wrote them. Brad Gooch brings to life O'Connor's significant friendships--with Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, Walker Percy, and James Dickey among others--and her deeply felt convictions, as expressed in her communications with Thomas Merton, Elizabeth Bishop, and Betty Hester. Hester was famously known as "A" in O'Connor's collected letters, The Habit of Being, and a large cache of correspondence to her from O'Connor was made available to scholars, including Brad Gooch, in 2006. O'Connor's capacity to live fully--despite the chronic disease that eventually confined her to her mother's farm in Georgia--is illuminated in this engaging and authoritative biography.PRAISE FOR FLANNERY "Flannery O'Connor, one of the best American writers of short fiction, has found her ideal biographer in Brad Gooch. With elegance and fairness, Gooch deals with the sensitive areas of race and religion in O'Connor's life. He also takes us back to those heady days after the war when O'Connor studied creative writing at Iowa. There is much that is new in this book, but, more important, everything is presented in a strong, clear light." --Edmund White "This splendid biography gives us no saint or martyr but the story of a gifted and complicated woman, bent on making the best of the difficult hand fate has dealt her, whether it is with grit and humor or with an abiding desire to make palpable to readers the terrible mystery of God's grace." --Frances Kiernan, author of Seeing Mary Plain: A Life of Mary McCarthy "A good biographer is hard to find. Brad Gooch is not merely good-he is extraordinary. Blessed with the eye and ear of a novelist, he has composed the life that admirers of the fierce and hilarious Georgia genius have long been hoping for." -- Joel Conarroe, President Emeritus, John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:53 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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