IN 1972 Flannery O’Connor was posthumously honored with the National Book Award for her Complete Stories. As her publisher, Robert Giroux, was readying himself to receive this highest of American literary prizes, he was caught short when an eminent author asked, “Do you really think Flannery O’Connor was a great writer? She’s such a Roman Catholic.” Brad Gooch might well have begun his much-anticipated biography–Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor (Little, Brown, 416 pp., $30)–with this remarkable charge. Instead, he places it on the penultimate page. This decision is regrettable, for it leaves us still needing the book that hasn’t been written during the 45 years since O’Connor’s death in 1964: a critical biography showing that her life and work are quite incomprehensible apart from her being “such a Roman Catholic.”
An interesting article on her in the March 9 National Review.