![]() ![]() The poet Elizabeth Bishop said her "writing is so damned good compared to almost anything else one reads: economical, clear, horrifying, real". O'Connor is by any measure one of the most important 20th-century American writers, arguably the greatest southern writer after William Faulkner (who said of her novel Wise Blood, "now that's good stuff"). Her relatively uneventful existence as a "hermit novelist" notwithstanding, it's astonishing that it has taken half a century for an authoritative biography of this major writer, who died in 1964, to appear. F lannery opens with an epigraph: "As for biographies, there won't be any biographies of me," Flannery O'Connor wrongly predicted, because "lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy." But as Brad Gooch shows in this skilful, gentle biography, what it lacked in titillation, O'Connor's short, poignant life made up for in intensity. ![]()
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